


Cement Rock City

by se_parsons



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-10
Updated: 2020-11-10
Packaged: 2021-03-09 00:22:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 39,292
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27485725
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/se_parsons/pseuds/se_parsons
Summary: Summary: People suck. People who deal with demons suck even more. Timeframe – after “Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things” before “Croatoan.”NOTE: Cement City Michigan is a real place that I have been to many times. I have tried to describe it accurately.Apologies to the rock band KISS, the State of Indiana, the Cement City Baptist Church and the honor of everyone that I have impugned. I am not entirely happy with this story and wasn’t certain whether or not I should post it, but I think it has a few unique elements that make it not entirely a waste of time, and so I allowed myself to be convinced that it was ultimately postable.
Relationships: Dean Winchester & Sam Winchester
Kudos: 1





	1. Part I - Ten o'clock and I know I gotta' hit the road

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cement City consisted of about five paved streets laid out in a rough grid-like pattern, surrounded by a couple of dirt alleys and empty farmland. It was nowhere, in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by a bunch of nowhere with nowhere on top and on the side and possibly even underneath. The houses were these rectangular little crackerjack boxes that just screamed company town, or else elderly dilapidated house trailers dating from somewhere around 1972. Paint was peeling. Non-working appliances and moldy, tattered furniture filled sagging porches. The yards were choked with weeds and tall grass and held too many dogs, all of which looked ill-kempt and cringing like they were waiting for somebody to kick them.
> 
> It was a bad place with a capital Bad.

Title: Cement Rock City  
Author: Sarah Ellen Parsons  
Fandom: Supernatural  
Pairing: None, Gen  
Rating: R, swearing, violence  
Word Count: 38,600 words give or take total, Part I – 3,568  
Disclaimer: Owned by Kripke and his corporate overlords. I am making no profit.

Summary: People suck. People who deal with demons suck even more. Timeframe – after “Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things” before “Croatoan.”

Notes: Do not archive without permission. Apologies to the rock band KISS, the State of Indiana, the Cement City Baptist Church and the honor of everyone that I have impugned. I am not entirely happy with this story and wasn’t certain whether or not I should post it, but I think it has a few unique elements that make it not entirely a waste of time, and so I allowed myself to be convinced that it was ultimately postable.

Thanks: To my wonderful betas: Kernezelda, queen of grammar and line-by; Hossgal, mistress of characterization and for reading the damned thing twice(her effort was above and beyond the call); Cofax7, who is full of good ideas and pointed out all the major things wrong with the first draft; K., who smacked me upside the head for my Rowlingesque tendencies and was a huge reality-check and full of level-headed advice; Florastuart for telling me where I was boring and confirming what was working; and the fabulous Barkley for being a fresh pair of eyes when they were desperately needed to see if the changes on the second draft were improving things. Anything that doesn’t suck is entirely because of them. I owe them all a lot of beer.

Part I - Ten o'clock and I know I gotta' hit the road

Dean pulled the car onto McGalliard and headed out toward I-69, still too pissed to turn on the radio as they raced past the endless chain restaurants, the K-Mart and the Meijer that was actually the commercial hub. Muncie was one of those mid-size towns where nearly everything had moved away from Main Street to the big parking lots and mini-van Mecca of the highway chain stores.

The bland sameness of everything was depressing. Instead of being somewhere, it felt like Anywhere, U.S.A. Could have been Illinois, could have been Tennessee, could have been Iowa, totally fucking generic. It didn’t even have any fleabag motels or mom and pop restaurants. They’d actually had to stay at Motel 6 and eat at a Denny’s. It went so against his grain that Dean felt like a demon trying to attend mass; he’d expected to light on fire as soon as he walked through the restaurant’s crappy glass doors.

But it wasn’t the hideous lack of imagination and generic blandness that made Muncie, Indiana destined to have a huge, black blot on it in Dean’s mind, oh no. It was something much, much worse.

“So tell me, college boy,” he began, not looking at his brother, slouched over in the passenger seat and staring out the window at the flat Indiana countryside, “Why is Indiana the Ball State? ‘Cause they mostly seem like dicks to me.”

“What?” Sam asked jumping a little in the seat and looking startled.

“Ball State. Why is it the Ball State and not some crap about thousands of square miles of boring?” Not that Dean cared, but maybe he could get Sammy to fight with him a little to take the edge off.

“Indiana isn’t the Ball State, Dean.” Sam was laughing, now. Laughing at him, which only pissed Dean off more. He sped up, ten miles over the speed limit, but there was the highway sign for I-69 coming up and he knew that it would legally allow 65, even if this crappy state couldn’t have a sane speed limit of 70 like everywhere else with a clue.

“Then why the fuck is it Ball State University, genius?” he asked.

Sam laughed. “Because of the jars.”

“Jars? Are you high?” Dean squinted hard at his brother, then merged onto I-69 neatly between two semis.

“Yeah, the Ball family patented the other kind of canning jars and made a ton of money. Just like the Mason family did, right?” Sam said. “So they gave money to found the university and they named it after them.”

“How in the hell do you know that?”

“University website, while I was researching the professor.”

“Oh,” Dean said, feeling less stupid. But leave it to his brother to bother reading up on how the university was founded while he was supposed to be tracking the possessed professor. “I still say they’re dicks.”

“Why?”

“Because somebody in Indiana poached our hunt, man!” Dean growled. “Poached it. Right out from under our noses! We came here to get that spirit and somebody already wasted it.”

“And what’s wrong with that?” Sam shrugged. “Plenty of ghosts to go around. And it wasn’t our ghost, anyway.”

“But it was ours,” Dean said, amazed at Sam’s stupidity on this one. “We were there.”

“What did you do, say “callsies?” Sam said. “Seems like somebody else got there first, Dean. I know this hasn’t happened before. I mean, it didn’t happen while I was… you know, gone, did it?”

“Once.” Dean gritted his teeth. Dad had been off somewhere and Dean had showed up in Ames, Iowa to take down a murderous ghost only to find that somebody had beaten him to it. “Never found out who did that, either… But come to think of it, it was at a college, too. Please don’t tell me there are other college-boy hunters out there because you are seriously bad enough!”

“I don’t know! It’s not like there’s a union.” Sam held up his hands in the universal attitude of surrender.

“This is crap,” Dean said. He was just glad as hell to be getting out of this stupid state.

“You’re not going to make us go to James Dean’s hometown again, are you?” Sam sounded anxious, checking for the turnoff. “I know it’s somewhere around here.”

“No,” Dean replied. “That was embarrassing. Lord God of cool from a place like that. I totally felt for the guy. If I’d been born there, I probably would have run off to suck cock in Hollywood, too, because that is one hell of a depressing widening of the road. Was there even a gas station?”

“Yeah,” Sam said. “I think it was by the trailer park.”

“Indiana totally sucks.” Dean passed the lumbering semi ahead of him, on the way to Michigan and their next hunt.

000

A little more than an hour later when they crossed the border to the Great Lake State, Sam snickered.

“If you’re going to bring up the Ball State thing, I’m going to kick your ass,” Dean’s tone made it clear it wasn’t a warning; it was a promise.

“Hey, look!” Sam pointed at a garish neon sign by the highway. “Porn!”

“Oooookaaaaay,” Dean drew out the word. “Is there something I should know?”

“Indiana doesn’t have porn,” Sam replied cheerfully. “You can totally tell what kind of place it’s going to be by all the crap they sell along the road when you first come in the state.”

“Is this some Sam Winchester grand unified theory of the highway or something?” Dean asked, amused despite himself.

“Sure,” Sam said, leaning back in his seat and launching into lecture mode. “For example, Wisconsin has porn, fireworks and cheese. So, pretty decent place overall. You can get laid, blow things up and eat. It says “welcome traveler.” Illinois, all about the porn and casinos, so go there for dirty fun, I guess. Michigan is strangely eclectic, because, you see right there, it’s porn, but up the road we’re going to start seeing u-pick orchard signs and wine tasting. Ohio has porn and Tom Raper’s RV, and I’m not sure what that actually means other than people want to leave Ohio and get laid.”

“If you’re on highway 10,” Dean said. “The tollway just has porn.”

“Right. And in Indiana, you just have fireworks, no porn, no cheese, no nothing. I’m figuring the fireworks exist because everyone here wants to blow themselves up.”

“Because they live in Indiana.”

“You got it,” Sam replied.

Dean turned off of I-69 to head east on highway 12.

“What are you doing?” Sam asked. “This is going to take forever!”

“Scenic route,” Dean said.

“Why are we going to drive 55 on a two-lane when the real highway is only a few miles north?”

“Because the last time I came up here, I nearly lost an axle in the potholes on 94. Michigan doesn’t do shit for their highways,” Dean replied. “And 12 takes us right where we want to go, anyway. And it’s a nice road. Dad and I came up here a while back to hunt a pack of ghouls in Litchfield, and it was less truck traffic and better paved than 94, so I figure it will be this time, too.”

Sam snorted.

“Dude, I so don’t have to justify my road choices to you,” Dean said and stifled his curse as he got caught going 40 behind some blue hair looking through the steering wheel of a 1980’s vintage Oldsmobile.

000

A tractor, two mobile homes on flatbeds and three pig trucks later, they were only just past Jonesville and Dean was ready to kill somebody. If Sammy was dumb enough to open his mouth about the route, it would be him.

Dean rummaged through tapes and tried not to grind his teeth too hard until he found what he was looking for. He popped it in and the soothing sounds of Ted Nugent’s “Stranglehold” began to blast from the Impala’s speakers.

If there was a prize for eye-rolling, Sammy would have won it just then.

“What?” said Dean. “It’s Michigan. We’re totally listening to the Nuge, dude.”

“What is it with you and regional band stuff, Dean?” he asked. “This is gonna be just like the endless Cheap Trick marathon for that week in Rockford, isn’t it?”

“Hey, could have been REO. Count your blessings.”

“Can we at least mix it up a little?” Sam sounded pained. “So it isn’t Nugent twenty-four seven while we’re here?”

“Fine, make an appropriate suggestion and I’ll consider it.” Sam knew crap about bands and Dean knew it.

“The Stooges and Iggy Pop are from Ann Arbor. We’re close enough. Also, Bob Seger, though I wouldn’t inflict that on my worst enemy,” Sam said.

“Hey, I’ve got Dad’s old “Live Bullet” tape here somewhere!” Dean smiled evilly. “Been studyin’ up, Sammy boy?”

“Self-defense, because it’s been a trend. You didn’t used to do this.”

“Gotta shake things up to keep them interesting,” Dean replied.

“Yeah, especially since you refuse to listen to any music written after 1980.”

“I listen to Metallica!”

“Ah, yes. How relevant of you,” Sam looked away out the window at the passing countryside. “Keeping your fingers on the pulse of modern music like that.”

“You don’t know a fucking thing about music, Sam,” Dean growled. “So you can just shut your cakehole or bite me. Your choice.”

Sam looked at Dean like he was sizing up Dean’s jugular and Dean was caught somewhere between admiration for the effectiveness of Sam’s bite plan and being totally creeped out.

“This music thing isn’t an endearing quirk, you know,” Sam said, finally. “It’s actually totally irritating. You’re getting set in your ways like some old man. I keep expecting you to randomly shake your fist and yell “get off my lawn” at kids wherever we go.”

“Never gonna happen, Sammy.”

“Why’s that?”

“Never gonna have a lawn,” Dean replied. “The house and white picket fence might be you livin’ the dream, but for me it would be living the extremely bad, crazy-making nightmare, ok?”

Sam sighed.

Dean hated it when he did that. It felt like being written off. Which sucked hardcore because Sammy used to worship the ground he walked on.

Not that Dean needed to be worshipped. It was just the feeling that in the time Sam had been gone he’d changed status from cool, tricky, badass older brother to hidebound, dimwitted embarrassment, somehow. Fucking college had done that. College was the worst thing that had ever happened to the Winchesters. Except for the demon.

He drove on in silence, cursing the line of idiots ahead of him on the two-lane who obviously had nowhere to be if driving 43 in a 55 mph zone meant anything at all.

It was after noon by the time they arrived in Cement City. Which was, if possible, even more pathetic a place than James Dean’s hometown. And even worse than that, it just felt wrong. The wrongness hit Sam the second they saw the buildings huddled together in the flat farm fields like they were circling the wagons against the great big empty. His head didn’t ache. He didn’t get a vision. Instead, it was like some reptile part of his brain started screaming “run away” the moment they caught sight of the cluster of houses silhouetted against the clear blue April sky. He glanced over at Dean, who was squinting out through the windshield like the sunlight had suddenly started to hurt his head.

Dean was not psychic. Or, at least, that was the party line. But Dean had instincts for bad creepy things that sometimes even surpassed their Dad’s. That frown he was wearing meant Sam wasn’t the only one that noticed something was wrong with this place.

Cement City consisted of about five paved streets laid out in a rough grid-like pattern, surrounded by a couple of dirt alleys and empty farmland. It was nowhere, in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by a bunch of nowhere with nowhere on top and on the side and possibly even underneath. The houses were these rectangular little crackerjack boxes that just screamed company town, or else elderly dilapidated house trailers dating from somewhere around 1972. Paint was peeling. Non-working appliances and moldy, tattered furniture filled sagging porches. The yards were choked with weeds and tall grass and held too many dogs, all of which looked ill-kempt and cringing like they were waiting for somebody to kick them.

It was a bad place with a capital Bad.

In a lifetime of crisscrossing the country in search of evil things to hunt and kill, Sam had realized that some places were just like that. They started out bad and either stayed that way or got a whole lot worse. A lot of times you found out that there’d been a massacre there, or that something had been desecrated, or that maybe the people who founded the place had just been bad people, and the badness had hung around to blight it ever after. Sometimes you didn’t know what it was. Sometimes it wasn’t worth asking. But you could always feel it, a chill up your spine, or a lingering feeling of sadness or depression. And it didn’t take a psychic to notice something was wrong. Dean and Dad had always both been very aware of places like that. They could sniff them out like bloodhounds.

This was one of them.

“Jesus,” Dean said, gesturing at the sad houses and littered yards. “Why would anything bother to haunt this?”

“I was just thinking the same thing,” Sam replied. “But two bodies in two months and desecrating a church sounds pretty heavy to me.”

Dean just grunted and turned down what could only charitably be termed Cement City’s main drag, a block along it sat two tiny churches among the residential buildings. One was a raised version of one of the houses and called the New Covenant of something; Sam immediately forgot, because it wasn’t the one they were looking for.

The other sat right on the edge of the farm fields and was a picture-perfect country church. Clapboard siding, fading white paint, those cheap textured colored glass windows in the big rectangular panels because it was obvious this place had never been prosperous enough to buy windows that told a story. One of those signs with the changeable letters stood out in the yard, reading Cement City Baptist Church, and had the times for services and bible study on it. It could have been nice except for the garish red symbols that circled the entire lower half of the church, obviously painted with a brush and not spray paint and the fading smears of something nasty that somebody had tried unsuccessfully to scrub off the doors.

The whole place gave Sam the creeps, the full-on hair standing up on the back of your neck, some undead thing getting ready to grab you heebie-jeebies. And he hadn’t even gotten out of the car yet.

The worst part was that it looked like a normal enough place. People obviously lived here, even though there didn’t appear to be anywhere to work. The vandalism was nothing that didn’t happen in other towns, same as Neo-Nazis desecrating a graveyard, really. Nothing here should be giving him that feeling of dread and impending disaster, nothing he could see so far, anyway. And yet, a four-alarm freak alert was ringing in his head as he looked at the vandalized church.

“That must be where they nailed the goat’s head,” Sam said, pointing at the stain on the door.

“What is the fucking point of that, exactly? This stinks.”

“What do you mean?” Sam asked.

“When, outside of a Stephen King story or maybe H.P. Lovecraft, do you find somebody having a big throwdown with the J-man like that?” Dean said and glanced over at him for confirmation, so Sam shrugged. Hell if he knew. “Because I’ve never seen it except for what the yellow-eyed bastard did to Pastor Jim. Demons stay the fuck away from consecrated ground. So why the church?”

“I guess that’s what we should try to find out.”

“And what’s the strategy on that one?” Dean looked around at the deserted streets and the untidy houses. “This place seem real friendly to you?”

“Not so much, no,” Sam agreed. “But I think the church is our in. I’ve got an idea, but we better find a motel and change first. Go back to the highway.”

“Whatever, dude,” Dean said, glancing back at him. “But I didn’t see any motels.”

“Let’s try east, then,” Sam vaguely flapped an arm in that direction. Dean turned the car.

000

The place they found was an astonishingly nice one. Most of the places they stayed were dives, but this one cost what a dive did and was obviously run by people who took pride in their occupation. It was almost like staying at your grandma’s house, or at least how Sam imagined somebody’s grandma’s house would be, with old-fashioned flowery bedspreads and everything neat and tidy and smelling like cleaning solution and furniture polish. Seventies horror he was used to, but this was so much the opposite. Somebody obviously wanted something as anonymous and transient as a motel room to feel like home. Yet another thing that was really very weird, but not bad, in this case. Not that you could tell that from the scowl Dean was wearing as he examined the room and the extra violence with which he slammed down his duffle. It was probably the flowers that were setting him off. Dean couldn’t handle anything that smacked of girly.

Sam pulled his suit out of his suit bag and wondered how Dean would do if he ever actually lived with a woman. Not that there was much of a chance of that, considering the life they led and the fact that Dean had already almost died twice in less than a year. Odds were, he’d never have the chance. Sam had had two years with Jess. Something Dean never had or most likely ever would have. His brother had been cheated. And that sucked.

Sam had tried to stop hating their lives. There was really no escape from it now until the demon was taken care of, anyway, not after Dad. He tried to be resigned to it, to the hunt, to his visions, to their fate, to everything. But he resented how much their lives had cost Dean. The fact that the longest relationship he’d ever had with a woman had lasted a couple of weeks, the fact that he’d never had a real home since Mom died, what he was going through now that Dad was gone and Dean really didn’t even know who he was anymore, it was all a nasty ball of bitter in the middle of Sam’s stomach that just wouldn’t go away.

The fact that Dean couldn’t even enjoy a nice motel room because it somehow offended the ethos that their lives had to suck all the time, killed him.

“You want the bathroom?” Dean asked.

“No, I’m good,” Sam said, rummaging for his tie in the bottom of the bag. There was no way he could bring any of this up to Dean. He’d tried countless times before he’d gone to school, but not now. Not with Dean doing things like breaking down next to the damned highway and confessing he ought to be dead and it was his fault about Dad. No way was Sam picking at him about anything right now.

Dean grunted and closed the bathroom door.


	2. II. I Feel Uptight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dean circled the church, making sure to get good shots of all the different symbols painted there. They went all the way around, entirely encircling the building. The ones Dean immediately recognized were about as bad as bad could be, straight up demon-summoning stuff from Agrippa’s “de occulta philosophia,” and sigils from the Key of Solomon, but he couldn’t see any pattern he recognized. It was like somebody had randomly thrown a grimoire at the church and everything had stuck. Once he got back to the front, an older man was approaching Sam, who was diligently scribbling notes in his notebook like a good little geek.

II. I Feel Uptight

Within an hour they were back in Cement City, only this time dressed like a couple of Mormon missionaries. Sammy wore his blue suit but Dean kept to the black one he favored whenever he had to do something like this. The damned tie made him feel like he was strangling, but he endured it because Sam was probably right about this one. Looking official and harmless was the best way to get people to talk.

His brother was already wearing his most sincere and puppy-like expression. Dean schooled his features into something he hoped resembled earnestness and made sure to open his eyes a bit wider than usual despite the bright afternoon sunlight. He had their old tattered Bible in one hand and a camera slung around his neck and Sam had a spiral notepad and pen, to complete their cover story.

The place had given him a bad feeling when they’d first driven through it, and it was even worse here, out of the safety of the car and walking around the church. Without even thinking about it, Dean had made sure he’d gone the right way around. He’d take no chances with widdershins on this one.

Dean circled the church, making sure to get good shots of all the different symbols painted there. They went all the way around, entirely encircling the building. The ones Dean immediately recognized were about as bad as bad could be, straight up demon-summoning stuff from Agrippa’s “de occulta philosophia,” and sigils from the Key of Solomon, but he couldn’t see any pattern he recognized. It was like somebody had randomly thrown a grimoire at the church and everything had stuck. Once he got back to the front, an older man was approaching Sam, who was diligently scribbling notes in his notebook like a good little geek.

“Is there something I can do for you boys?” the older man asked, in a way that was both helpful and wary. He had grey hair, and wore some really fugly light blue polyester pants over a pot belly topped by a button-down short-sleeved shirt. His face was kindly, though, and Dean was pretty sure this had to be the minister.

“Yes, sir,” Sam said in his most convincing tone with the slightest Texas drawl for the authenticity of their cover story, “I was wondering if somebody could tell us about what happened here. I’m John McCartney and this is Rick Harrison, we’re reporters from The Baptist Standard. This should have made national news, what with the church being under attack from Satanists and all, and no mainstream outlets taking anything like that seriously. We were wondering if there were people we could talk to about it and find out what happened.”

“Well, boys, I’m Dale Roberts, and I’m the pastor here,” he said. “But I don’t think this was exactly what you could term a Satanist attack. We pretty much know who did it. It’s just proving it that’s hard when their parents won’t take the vandalism of a house of God seriously.”

“You’re saying it was kids?” Dean asked.

“Yeah, sure. Bunch of them around here like that rock and roll nonsense and put those hooligans in their hearts instead of Jesus. There’s been a couple of revivals over to Jackson about it. We always get a good turnout, save a few souls, but it doesn’t seem to stop the rest of them turning away toward the world,” the minister shook his head sadly. “I pray and I preach, and I try to make them feel the power of the Word, but they continue to turn away from the Lord.”

“So where did they learn those symbols they painted on the church, then?” Dean asked.

“I figured they got them from one of those devil-themed rock and roll albums,” the minister said with a shrug, but Dean caught something shifty around his now not-so kindly eyes. He knew something. “Like by that Alice Cooper or that Oscar Osbourne.”

“Alice Cooper, right, Dean caught Sam’s eye over the guy’s head. “He’s from Detroit, isn’t he?”

Sam winced.

“Methodists,” the minister said with disgust. Dean raised his eyebrows at his brother.

“But haven’t some people been killed here recently?” Sam asked, getting them back on track. “This area isn’t exactly known for its crime rate.”

“That’s mostly because they cover it up.” Pastor Roberts smiled and shrugged. “The prison, you know.”

“No, we don’t,” said Dean.

“A lot of crime doesn’t get reported because people have a vested interest in making the prison town look safe,” the pastor said. “There’s plenty of crime and all, but you don’t read about it in the paper or see it on the news. It gets covered up, even though it’s higher than national average and state average every year. About, well I suppose it’s years ago now, some of the prison trustees were out working at the Waterloo Recreation area and walked over to the houses nearby, murdered a man and his wife, and got back on the bus to prison. It took them eight or nine years to find out what had happened. Typical.”

“But these recent victims didn’t have anything to do with the prison, did they? They were both young men, is that right?” Sam asked.

“Teenaged boys,” Pastor Roberts said thoughtfully. “Just like the ones that did this, to my mind. One from Brooklyn and the other from out on Lake Columbia, they all go to that godless high school together. I keep telling my flock to home school, but too few of them do.”

“And the police have questioned the kids from the school, I suppose?” Sam continued.

“Of course, but no one’s been arrested. The police claim there’s no evidence. Everyone’s very upset. The two dead boys were both football players, you know. But they were not good boys. Not good boys at all.”

“What do you mean “not good boys”?” Dean asked.

The pastor sighed. “Football players around here can get away with anything as long as they win, and that team up to the high school has completely turned around this year. They won the state championships. That means those boys can do no wrong, no matter what wrong they do. And they do plenty.”

“Really?” Sam asked, obviously hoping the man would explain more about the dead football players.

“You don’t think what happened to my church and what happened to those boys are related, do you?” the pastor asked anxiously. “That the children who did this might be killing one another for Satan?”

It was clear the man was genuinely horrified at the possibility of this. Dean was pretty good at telling when someone was lying or possessed and he was getting no vibe off this guy that way. He knew more about the symbols than he was telling, but that was the only thing hinky about him.

“Well, we’d have to know the details of the murders to know for sure, and there was nothing in the newspaper accounts that brought us here.” Sam went on with the questioning. “You never know with these Satanic cults. Were there any symbols found around the bodies? Circles? Candles?”

“No, nothing like that, from what I’ve heard.” The pastor spoke too quickly. Dean would bet there had been symbols or candles or something and the pastor knew it.

Dean was working hard to keep his pleasant going on because the old dude was giving them exactly nothing that they didn’t already know. But down the street he could see a group of boys gathering in the overgrown front yard of one of the houses. They were dressed in jeans and black t-shirts of varying kinds, but none of the pseudo-gangster crap you saw on so many city kids. One shirt had a Metallica logo on it.

“If you’ll excuse me, sir,” Dean said with his best choirboy face. “I think I’ll go and try to have a talk with those boys over there. Maybe they saw something.”

“Well, I wish you luck,” Pastor Roberts frowned at the boys down the street. “They probably do know something, but the police couldn’t get anything out of them.”

“Seeing we’re not the police, maybe they’ll talk to us.” Dean smiled. It had been a while since he’d practiced sincere in the mirror, so he was just relying on muscle memory. And after all that happened, with the Demon, with Dad and being dead, he wasn’t sure it was all holding up as well as it used to. “And people like the idea of being in the paper and having someone listen to what they have to say.”

He left Sammy with the pastor Boring Drones-a-lot and ambled his way down the block toward the group of boys. The bad vibe of the place had only gotten worse when they’d gotten out of the car. He’d had a skin-crawling sort of feeling on the back of his neck since they’d gotten to Cement City, and as he walked along the block he figured it out.

The place was absolutely silent besides the little rustles the wind sometimes made in the grass or the branches of the trees. There were no birds like you’d expect out in the country. It was past winter, but Dean couldn’t even see a squirrel. The only animals he saw were the whiny dogs tied up or fenced in the crappy yards of the houses, and they didn’t look very happy. It was weird. It had his “bad place” alarm bells ringing.

The boys were smoking, and eyeballing Dean from the bottom of his scuffed black dress shoes with the worn-down heels, over his cheap J.C. Penney suit, to his short haircut. No way for them to tell that it was a disguise and not a dork heading toward them. His advantage.

Dean came to a stop in the weedy gravel driveway of the little house and greeted the boys, who had all turned toward him and were eyeing him suspiciously.

“Hey,” he said.

“You a cop?” one of them asked, a gawky pimple-faced reject who could have been any kid from any of the thirty or so schools Dean had attended growing up.

“Reporter,” Dean dropped some of the shiny upstanding crap he’d been dishing out to the pastor.

“So you wanna know if we saw anybody do anything to the church?” asked another one of the boys, this one in a t-shirt heralding his devotion to Slip Knot.

“To start.”

“And if we knew the kids who died, right?” Metallica again.

“And if the two things are related. Because I figure you’re a lot more likely to know something about it than the pastor over there, am I right?”

“Just because they’re our age doesn’t mean we know or care,” Slip Knot kid said.

“Yeah, do your fucking research” the fourth kid blew smoke right at Dean from a half-finished cigarette. Somebody thought he was a fucking badass.

Dean smiled at him. Or maybe it was just baring his teeth because the kid got this weird look on his face that might just have been something like fear. Dean’s smile widened.

“There’s not much to research. A couple of lines in the paper that don’t say much. Some symbols painted on a church. A goat’s head that was obviously somebody’s idea of a joke, seeing it doesn’t go with the symbols at all. Two dead football players killed exactly two months apart.” Dean looked at them coolly. “Know anything about that?”

“Everybody does,” pimple face replied.

“And? Anything you want to say about it? Maybe something that didn’t make the papers already?”

“We’re not here to do your job for you,” Slip Knot wore a mean little smile on his pinched, underfed face.

“So where were the bodies dumped?” Dean continued.

“One of them down at the old cement pit,” said Metallica. “And the other one was at the county park by Clark Lake. It was in the paper.”

“And the kids who got it, what were they like?” Dean asked.

“Assholes,” the tough guy said, to nods of agreement all around.

“They think just because they have money, and play football, they own the world or something.” The pimply kid spoke with so much resentment you could have bottled and sold it as “essence of teen angst.”

“So they had money.” Dean raised his eyebrows. “Anything else about them? Did they know each other?”

“Sure, all the jocks hang around together,” Metallica kid said. “It’s that communal brain cell they share.”

“Must play football, drink beer, fuck cheerleader, good,” Slip Knot kid grunted in full caveman-speak. Having kicked the asses of more than a few football players in his time, Dean knew the feeling and sympathized, though the scrawny little bastard would probably never know the pleasure of grinding the star linebacker’s face into the asphalt of the school parking lot after being called an auto shop retard one too many times.

“So how did they die?” Dean asked, not smiling. “The paper didn’t say anything about it. It didn’t tell who found them or anything.”

“They had their throats cut,” Slip Knot kid shook his head, but the boys all eyed each other again, like confirming the party line, which was interesting. “But there was no blood, anywhere. Not on them, or anywhere around. That’s the totally fucked up thing about it. Cops can’t figure it out at all, so that’s why they keep saying there’s no evidence.”

“There was an autopsy on Matt, the first one, but my friend Sean, his stepdad’s a cop. He said they didn’t find anything in it,” Tough Guy said.

“They sure couldn’t run blood tests, anyway. Maybe somebody’s killing them with their brain.” Metallica laughed.

“That would be awesome!” Pimple face joined in. “I know, like, twenty people you could take out and totally make the world a better place.”

“And the church?” Dean asked. The boys’ hilarity immediately damped like somebody had tossed a bucket of water on them.

“I’d say totally unrelated,” Tough Guy said with a look that was as obvious as if “I’m guilty” was painted across his forehead in the same red paint adorning the side of Cement City Baptist. “But the church got what was comin’ to them, after what they did.”

“Which was?” Dean asked.

“That’s really not your business, man.” Tough Guy’s eyes narrowed.

Dean gave him a look that he hoped had a measure of sincere in it. “I’m a reporter. I try to tell the truth about what happens. I try to make sure that everybody gets to tell their side of it.”

“Right,” Tough Guy said skeptically. “We get the paper here. We get tv. We see how much truth reporters tell.”

“They just print what they get paid to say. Or not say. Or just get everything wrong,” Slip Knot sneered. “You’re the same.”

“And I’d have any interest in lying about what caused the church to get painted because?” Dean asked.

The boys exchanged a look. Tough Guy shook his head.

“You’re interviewing Pastor Roberts,” Pimple-Face said.

“Yeah, we figured he might know something,” Dean looked from kid to kid, but saw no weak spot he could press. “It’s his church, right?”

“I bet he told you it was us,” Tough Guy crossed his arms across his chest, starting to get in Dean’s face.

“So what if he did?” Dean said.

“And you believe him, right?” Slip Knot asked, moving to the side in a way Dean didn’t like but wasn’t about to let on bothered him.

“I believed him so much I came right over here to talk to you,” Dean said. “’Cause my partner and I are just takin’ his word for it.”

The kids exchanged looks again.

“We’re not saying we did it,” Metallica said finally, after looking carefully at Tough Guy and getting a tiny nod. “But we know that they had it coming.”

“They had getting their church desecrated with a goat head and demonic symbols coming,” Dean said slowly.

The boys exchanged glances again and Tough Guy gave them all a shrug.

“This sounds like a story worth hearing,” Dean said. “So why don’t you spit it out?”

“’Cause it’s nobody’s business, man,” Tough Guy said. “That’s just a bad place, and the pastor is a bad man and he does bad things to people. Says he’s full of the love and power of Jesus, but he just turns people against each other and makes them get full of hate. The only thing that’s different now, is that the church looks on the outside like it is on the inside.”

“Are you saying Pastor Roberts is a Satanist?” Dean asked.

“I don’t know what he believes in, other than having power over other people. Power is all he talks about. Not like the old pastor,” Tough Guy glared into Dean’s face. “But that’s bad enough. I got nothing more to say to you or your paper.”

“Me neither,” Metallica said.

The other boys nodded agreement.

“So that’s all, then?” Dean asked.

“What were you expecting, a signed confession?” Tough Guy tossed down his cigarette butt and tapped it out with the toe of his sneaker. “Oh, yeah, we did it! Lock us up and send us to juvie.”

“I was expecting not to get jerked around by a bunch of assholes who don’t know anything about anything,” Dean finally cut the trying to be nice crap. He was obviously not getting anything else out of these kids.

“Right, that’s us,” Tough Guy said smirking. “Have fun with your story.”

The boys turned their backs on Dean and headed down the street rapidly.

“Have fun living your whole lives in this crap town,” Dean grumbled. He turned and walked back up the narrow asphalt road to where Sam still stood with the pleasantly smiling Pastor Roberts.

“I see that they spoke to you.” Roberts’ smile never slipped, but there was now definitely something cold around his eyes. “More ridiculous lies, I’m sure.”

“Well, they said they weren’t the ones who painted the symbols on the church,” Dean said, laying on the innocence again for the different audience.

“And of course we know that that’s not true.” The pastor shook his head sadly. “I keep hoping they’ll come back to us and see the Lord’s light for themselves. So many of their families have felt the power right here. Yet, they keep straying further and further from salvation and a future of victory in the Lord’s love.”

“Well, thank you so much for your time,” Dean said, taking Sam by the arm and pulling him back toward the Impala. “We should really stop troubling you now and get on with the rest of our story. Other interviews.”

“Um, yes.” Sam gave the man a wave. “Thank you so much, Pastor Roberts.”

000

When they were out of earshot, Sam pulled his arm roughly out of Dean’s grasp and whispered, “What the hell, man? I was just getting him past talking about his special Wednesday prayer group.”

“Don’t need to know about the prayer group, Sammy,” Dean told him. “Those boys painted the symbols as an advertisement of what they think is really going on inside.”

“Wow. That’s bad. Did they say anything about the dead boys?” he asked. “Because Pastor Roberts had a few things to say.”

“Did they go to the church?” Dean asked.

“No, they didn’t. They were “heathens”, trying to lure young girls into their grasp.”

“That would be any self-respecting boy in high school,” Dean said with a smile of reminiscence.

“Yes, but apparently these two were more successful than some of the others,” Sam replied. He hadn’t liked what he’d heard. It kind of reminded him of some theories from his sociology class, with the rich boys picking poor girls and then disposing of them once they had their fun. “The first one who was killed, Matt, seduced one of the church girls, Laurie. He came with her to prayer group a couple of times, then backed off. Seems like he had her completely under his thumb, at least according to the pastor, who was spitting mad about it. Got her to stop going to church for a while. She’s back now, in disgrace, of course. But the pastor is convinced that Matt was killed for the sin of leading her astray. That it was the Lord’s retribution.”

“Heavy.”

“I thought so, too,” Sam said. “Lucky nobody ever thought of smiting you.”

“Yeah, well, I just keep coming back like whack-a-mole, anyway,” Dean shrugged. “The kids said they were assholes with money. That’s a pretty powerful lure for some chicks.”

Sam looked pointedly at his brother, desperately wanting to say something about the whack-a-mole thing, but he could see that Dean was just having one of his more and more schizoid moments, where he wanted to fight or kick somebody because he didn’t know what to do with all the pain. He didn’t know what had set Dean off, maybe something the boys had done, but he didn’t want to. Dean was going to have to try a lot harder to get Sam to fight with him.

Sam took a few extra long strides, opened the door of the car and climbed in, in order to give himself a minute, and Dean space to gain more composure.

Once Dean was in the driver’s seat, Sam spoke again. “I found out that the boys were killed at the cement pit and the county park.”

“Yeah, me too,” Dean replied eyeing him carefully. “Got a preference of which to check out first?”

“County park?” Sam suggested. “This time of day it wouldn’t be too weird to go there.”

“And an abandoned cement mine is weird no matter when you go,” Dean said.

“Right.”

Dean nodded. “Cool, but I’m totally changing out of this suit.”

The county park looked just like hundreds of other public swimming places that littered the Midwest wherever there was accessible water. Dean remembered them fondly from when he was a kid and Dad said they had time to stop and practice swimming. It was never going swimming for fun, it was always practicing, but that didn’t mean it hadn’t been fun just the same. Him and Sammy racing out to the ever-present floating platform and then back again, practicing diving, holding their breath as long as they could underwater. Good times.

Like so many other of these parks, it featured an open swim area backed by widely-spaced shade trees and ground dotted by picnic tables and metal cooking grills cemented into the ground. In Dean’s experience, he never remembered anybody but his dad actually using them to cook on, but they were always there just the same.

The place looked normal. Nice. Clean water, sunlight shining through the leaves of the trees, a little breeze that made the ripples sparkle. It looked beautiful, not like a crime scene. That was until you saw the remains of the yellow police tape wrapped around the trunks of some of the big old trees down by the water.

“Looks like we found it,” Dean said, nodding at the tape.

Sam had been gazing in the other direction and smiling, probably remembering parks just like Dean had been, but his face went all serious as soon as he saw the tape, and he got that intense look he always wore when he was putting things together in his head.

Dean trudged over to the remains of the tape and checked out the trampled-down grass. There was really nothing there to see, just footprints left by the authorities and probably gawkers. Bodies always attracted gawkers.

He moved away from the trampled area and began hunting around for anything strange. Something a regular investigator wouldn’t be looking for. Those were the only clues he and Sammy were interested in, anyway, clues that this might not be a regular murder.

No evidence along the bank of anything coming out of the water, which was a relief. Dean hated fighting things in lakes or worse, the ocean. That was just plain bad news all the way around, no matter how good a swimmer you were. If something could breathe underwater and you couldn’t, you were hosed, or at least severely disadvantaged.

He started tracking back inland in a wide loop around the trampled area, carefully examining the ground, the trees. Whatever tracks they might find would be useless from all the confusion. He had to hope for something more obvious.

“Dean?” Sam had wound his way back toward the water. “Come over here.”

“You find somethin’?”

Sam pointed at one of the rusty grills, in the area right next to where the body had been found. It had been used recently, and held the remains of a wood fire, not charcoal. It was canted toward the water, but that wasn’t unusual at a county park. If they were close enough to the lake, people would use the grills as boat anchors.

“What is it?” Dean asked, and Sam nodded at the side of the grill facing the lake next to where the body had been found.

It was a symbol, scratched into the rusty metal with something sharp. It would be easy enough for normal cops to overlook. They’d probably just think it was graffiti.

Dean swore, long and creatively. He looked at Sam. “We’ve got to get down to the cement pit. This better not be what it fucking looks like.”

“It was on the church, too,” Sam said. “Along with all that other stuff. But it didn’t make any sense. It wasn’t in any order.”

“The stuff on the church was painted all the way around it,” Dean made a circle with his hand. “And yeah, four sides is not exactly a circle, but it was all around.”

Sam nodded grimly.

“Shit.” Dean hauled ass back to the car, Sam loping alongside him.

The cement pit was a nasty bit of devastation that looked just like the one where they used to film all the old Star Trek episodes, like the one where Kirk fought the Gorn and impossibly made gunpowder out of stuff that just happened to be lying around on top of the ground. Dean had often wished to be able to asspull gunpowder like that, not to mention diamonds.

There was no yellow tape here, but the trampled area in the sandy dirt above the stone was enough to tell them where the body had lain. And a blackened area showed that a fire had been, here, too.

“Body was here, but no bloodstains,” Dean pointed at the spot. “You should be able to see it. Blood would have soaked into the stone.”

They didn’t have to look long to find it, either. Another, different, but not unexpected sigil, carved into the wall of the pit only a few feet from where the body had been.

“We are so fucked,” Dean said.

“Maybe not.”

“You know what that means.” Dean pointed at the sign. “As well as I do.”

“I don’t know that for sure,” Sam said. He was being all measured and calculating and shit, so Dean hoped that meant he had something up his sleeve. “I know what it looks like, but it’s always dumb to jump to conclusions.”

“Whatever,” Dean said. “But I know what it is, even if you don’t want to name it. Now we need to get a detailed county road map.”

“Brooklyn’s big enough to have a grocery store. But there’s always Google earth.”

“We’ll get the map and then we’ll get you somewhere where you can bogart somebody’s Internet,” Dean replied and headed back toward the car.


	3. Part III - Everybody's gonna' move their feet

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “What were they doing, drinking water from the nuclear power plant or something?”
> 
> “Michigan is probably the most polluted state in the Union,” Dean said. “I remember reading about it somewhere. People from Michigan have more chemicals in their bodies than normal people. And, apparently, so do the deer.”
> 
> “How reassuring,” Sam told him.
> 
> “Yeah, well, we’re not going to eat what we kill,” Dean smiled and batted his eyelashes.

Part III - Everybody's gonna' move their feet

It didn’t take long to get down to Brooklyn, which was, judging from the signs, the home of the class “C” football champions for the most recent year and not a lot else.

He hadn’t seen a grocery store yet, as he headed south on the main drag, marked both Main and M-50, but he did see something just as good and pulled into a rock star parking spot right in front of it.

“The library?” Sam asked. “Since when do I not have to beg you to go to a library?”

“Since it’s right here on our way, probably has an internet connection, and is bound to have recent local papers and other stuff to check up on to make sure those two murders were the only ones. You know there’ll be eight if it’s what it looks like,” Dean said.

“It’s not that,” Sam said, like saying that decisively enough would make it true.

“I hope it’s not, but you know where those symbols go as well as I do,” Dean said. “You’ve been able to draw one of those suckers since you were ten.”

The library closed at five, meaning they still had a couple of hours of quality scrounging. The old lady at the desk eyed them suspiciously when they came into the tiny building, and Dean gave her his most dazzling smile as he went over to the recent periodicals. All of them paper, tattered and stacked messily in a little room with only a couple of chairs and a battered and scarred wood table. The library was depressingly dark for somewhere you were supposed to read, and smelled like it had probably flooded a few times. It was chilly and dark and awful, and the floorboards creaked with every step Dean took, which meant Sammy would probably love it like a lost puppy.

It didn’t take him long to find what he wanted, Brooklyn’s weekly paper. Full of the kind of local shit that never made it to the internet feeds, but was usually a jackpot of information for somebody like him.

He went back a week and found the long, hometown obituary page, which listed every friend, relative, favorite pastime, and pet each of the blue-haired croakers on it had ever had. And there, on a hero spread, was the obit of the most recent dead kid. A school picture complete with football uniform and a ten-point headline that read, “Local football hero’s tragic passing.”

Dean wondered how much more tragic they’d find it if they ever learned the truth.

It was the same stuff they’d heard from the pastor and the boys from Cement City, kid named Mike found at the county park on the lake, dead, throat cut but no blood in his body, death ruled murder but unexplained, buried in a nearby cemetery, which Dean made sure to note in case they needed it later. List of parents, all the vital statistics that made up a too-short life wasted.

He went back a month and found the nearly identical obit of the other boy, Matt. List of accomplishments, this time a picture of him in an Eagle Scout uniform, looking like a total dork, probably what the parents wanted. He couldn’t imagine any self-respecting teenaged boy who’d want to be remembered like that, no matter how much community service and merit badges he’d done.

But that Eagle scout uniform was troubling in another way, too. The pastor had said that the two football players who had died had been bad boys, the kids in Cement City had called them assholes with money. How exactly could you be bad, if you spent your time doing community service and all the crap you had to do to wear that uniform in the first place? It just didn’t add up. He looked at the kid’s sappily smiling face and didn’t get a single evil vibe off him.

“How did you end up dead, dude?” he asked quietly like the kid could tell him something. But all the psychic crap was Sammy’s thing. Dean just put the paper back down in the pile.

While he was at it, he scanned backward in the other issues, to see if there was anything out of the ordinary. It was mostly somebody being pissed off about the zoning ordinances. Big race day at MIS, complete with pictures of NASCAR fans caravaning down the town’s main street. Incredibly elaborate wedding announcements for pimply-faced brides in their sequined finery, written like they were high society in New York or somewhere. And, four months back, a tiny line-item about a missing woman.

Mrs. Walter Van Ness, 83, had gone missing from her daughter’s home on Lake Columbia. She had Alzheimer’s and her daughter had come home to find the door open and her mother gone. The search was on.

As far as Dean could tell, he’d just found victim number three. He went back another month to find absolutely nothing. Maybe Mrs. Van Ness had been the first. He tried November, and nothing again.

He was hopeful then. Checked October to be sure, but it seemed clear.

The woman at the desk was growing restless. Dean put away his notebook and the local papers and went to find Sam, who was just gathering his print-outs from the Library’s one internet station.

He didn’t have to say anything, just smiled at the librarian and followed Sam out the door back to the car. He turned expectantly to look at his brother.

“Isn’t that a great town library! It’s just what you’d expect from a neat little town like this,” Sam said, smiling benignly at the dumpy little building. Loved it, just like Dean had thought.

“Yeah, it’s great,” Dean said. “Has books and everything. Did you find out anything in it?”

“No other teenagers have died,” Sam got down to business. “Just the two. That wrecks your theory.”

“Not necessarily,” Dean said. “I’ve found somebody who went missing. It looks like they’re happening on a monthly schedule. She disappeared two months to the day before the first high school kid, which leaves a space in-between that probably is filled up with somebody dead, but we just don’t know who.”

“Shit,” said Sam. “So I got us some map information, but it probably wouldn’t hurt to buy one, too.”

“Ok, to the grocery, then.” Dean turned the car south on Main to head further into town.

The one grocery in town was tiny, with only two checkout lanes. There were quite a few maps for sale along with the periodicals, but nothing that had the level of detail Dean wanted. He went up to one of the clerks. “You got any other maps than the ones in this rack?”

“What do you want it for?” the woman asked pleasantly while she rang up an old man’s order of hotdogs, milk and prune juice.

“Hunting,” Dean said, with total honesty. “I’m scouting out a good place for my brother and me for bow season and we need to see what the land is like, not just where the roads are.”

“You want the atlas on the bottom shelf,” the woman smiled. “It’s a topographical map of the whole state. Really detailed. You can practically see the deer on it.”

“Awesome!” Dean gave her a thumbs up.

The brown atlas lay on the bottom shelf next to “Michigan Outdoors” and “Field and Stream”. Cost more than he’d have liked, but once he looked inside, Dean saw it would be worth every penny. It wasn’t just topographical, it had houses on it and everything.

Sam let out a low whistle. “Ok, so is somebody planning to invade Michigan? Because that is just, wow.”

“Might be for the other kind of hunters, but you have to love their attention to detail,” Dean smiled wolfishly. “People around here love their deer hunting, little bro. They even have a special TV show on PBS devoted to Michigan deer hunting. Caught it once back in, maybe ninety-one, ninety-two when we were here with Dad. Had some freak-ass mutant deer from over by Ann Arbor. It had just one big horn with like 130 points. The whole top of its head looked like a porcupine. And there was another one with an extra leg and one that was just really huge and had like four antlers.”

“What were they doing, drinking water from the nuclear power plant or something?”

“Michigan is probably the most polluted state in the Union,” Dean said. “I remember reading about it somewhere. People from Michigan have more chemicals in their bodies than normal people. And, apparently, so do the deer.”

“How reassuring,” Sam told him.

“Yeah, well, we’re not going to eat what we kill,” Dean smiled and batted his eyelashes.

Sam brandished the atlas at him. “Let’s go buy this thing.”

“Then you’re going to let me have it and you’re going to drive back to the motel,” Dean said.

“Not until we get something to eat,” Sam folded his arms and put on his stubborn face.

“Dude, we’re in a grocery store.” Dean waved a hand at the stocked shelves surrounding them. “Knock yourself out.”

000

“You boys find the atlas you were looking for?” the woman at the check-out asked as Dean and Sam came up with their purchases.

“Yes, thanks.” Sam turned on the smile, showing his dimples to advantage. “It’s exactly what we need.”

Dean smiled, too, could feel it not reach his eyes. He stopped to rummage in his wallet for cash, seeing Sam didn’t seem inclined to do it. His brother’s motley collection of snack food, bottled water, bread, mustard and lunchmeat slid by on the conveyor, where it was scooped into the bag by a sullen-looking boy wearing a name-tag that read, “Hi, I’m Jim. How can I help?”

Dean looked up and found himself being glared at by Slip Knot. Who was apparently wondering how he could help. Help kick Dean’s ass, by the look of him.

Dean ignored him and paid the cashier, who was flirting pleasantly with Sam even though she couldn’t have been a day under forty. He could feel the kid’s eyes boring into his back.

He turned on him to take the bags, wearing his best “who me?” expression.

“So you’re hunters now,” the kid said in a way that was far more threatening than it either needed to be or should have been, coming from a scrawny high schooler. “Not reporters?”

“You can do both,” Dean said. The kid was totally on to them, not good.

“Stay out of it,” Jim told him, slamming the bag into his hands. “You don’t know what’s going on here. You’ll just make it worse.”

“Look kid…”

“It’s just getting worse all the time when people try things. It will just keep getting worse,” the kid said passionately. “So stay away!”

“We’re here to help,” Dean told him.

“Then help by staying out of it!”

Dean could feel Sam’s eyes boring into him, but they had to get out of there before they discussed anything, so he led the way out to the car, thinking hard.

“What was that about?” Sam asked as they got in the Impala. Dean had forgotten about letting Sammy drive as he worried about what Slip Knot meant. “That was one of those kids from Cement City, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah, he just warned us off. Said that if people try things, everything gets worse.”

“What does he mean by that?”

“How the hell should I know?” Dean said.

“It doesn’t sound good.”

“No, it doesn’t,” Dean said, pulling absently out of the parking lot and turning right into the KFC next door.

“Hey, we just bought food,” Sam protested.

“Dude, it’s dinner time. Like I’m not going to get food,” Dean said. “You can make yourself a crappy sandwich if you want. I want something hot.”

Sam broke down and ordered a chicken sandwich and fries, and they took their haul back to the motel, where Dean immediately began poring over the map, making sure not to drip grease or gravy on it while he read.

Sam fired up the laptop and spent a lot of time turning it this way and that until he realized there would be no stolen wireless for him. And the motel was old enough and basic enough that there was no plug-in Internet either.

“Going to have to go back to the Library again tomorrow,” Sam said.

“Maybe not,” Dean replied. “I think I know where to look.”

“How?”

“You saw the symbols, same as me,” Dean said. “And you know where they came from, same as me. Put it together, genius.”

“And it has to do with the map, how?” Sam looked over Dean’s shoulder at the map. Dean had a pencil and an old business card from a Tennessee gun store and was busily drawing on the map using the card as a straight-edge. He marked the two points where the bodies were found with the symbols they’d found at each site. Then he looked expectantly up at Sam.

“I’m glad Dad didn’t have to pay for all that fancy schooling,” he said. Sam’s blank expression began heading down the hill toward pissed. “I guess I’ll just have to draw you a picture.”

Dean drew and he could feel Sam’s eyes burning into him as he did it.

“Oh shit,” Sam said when he was done. “But the stuff on the church was all jumbled up with a bunch of other crap that’s not even part of that. Do you really think… I hope to hell that’s completely wrong, man.”

“Me, too,” Dean said. “But I bet you serious cash it’s not. And now that we’ve got a working theory, we should head back out to Cement City and see what we can see.”

“Bible study tonight,” Sam offered.

“Yep,” Dean said. “But I think we’d better not go in the front door.”

There were exactly four buildings in Cement City that weren’t houses. Two were churches, one was the Cement City Tap and the last was an antique store on the edge of town. They all had parking lots, but the only place they could safely stash the Impala at this time of day was the bar.

Dean pulled into the parking lot and turned off the car, but didn’t let go of the steering wheel. He knew what was going to happen now and just hated the whole idea. They’d have to go in that shitty bar and try to charm the locals, give themselves an alibi for being there, try to get whatever information they could about what was going on.

It wasn’t the job he hated. He was fine with killing things and destroying evil. It was this kind of crap that made him so tired lately. He hated having to lie and handle and manipulate human beings, the thing his face and his charm had always made so easy, had used to seem like a special game. Had made it all seem like he was showing off and proving his worth to the Winchester team. It had been fun. And now all it did was make him miss his Dad.

Because John Winchester could have just gone in there with his obvious bad-assity and wouldn’t have had to try to charm anyone. People would come up to John and spill their guts. Perfect strangers. Dean had seen it over and over again. They recognized the strength there. His dad had never had to lie about what he was, he just was, and people responded.

What they responded to in Dean was a lie. It was the promise of his actually giving a shit about them and not just about finding out what he needed to know to do his job. It was bullshit of the highest order and he had no bullshit left in him right now. He felt too hollowed out to be able to tap the well of harmless lies that had always seemed so endless before.

“Dean?” He turned to see his brother looking at him in that way. That puppy-like way he’d had since, well, since forever.

He loved Sammy, but right now all he wanted to do was smash that look off his face. Because that look always said, “Be the man, Dean,” and that had been perfectly all right when it was just, “Take care of Sammy for a couple of days, Deano. There’s food in the fridge and I’ll be right back.”

But now it meant “Be the man forever.” Figuring out what they were going to do, where they were going to go next, what they would hunt. Until the visions, Sam had let Dad or Dean make the hunting decisions. He was a great hunter when he tried, but he wasn’t used to having all the responsibility and making the decisions and he didn’t take it on unless Dean or Dad were out of commission. Dean was used to doing it, but only for a while, then the pressure would be off again. And now… Now Dean was going to make Sam take that fucking look off his face by doing all the fake charming bullcrap with him as well.

“Yeah?” he asked in the fake pleasant voice. He wished it could be more sincere, but he couldn’t manage it.

“Will you tell me what’s wrong?” Sam sounded and looked all of ten.

“Just a headache, it’s no big.”

Sam sighed his long-suffering sigh and Dean shut his eyes.

“Dean, you’ve got to tell me what it is. I can’t help you if you won’t tell me what’s going on,” Sam said. “I’m not psychic!”

Dean laughed out loud.

“Ok, so I am psychic, but it’s not like it works when I need it to or anything, Jesus, Dean!” Sam protested. “Stop being such an inscrutable dickhead!”

So much for the pity-party Dean had been throwing for himself. That shit was better left to Sam, anyway. Dean had to get out there and be the man now, or more people were going to die.

“Let’s go get a beer, Sammy, and wait for the prayer meeting to get in full swing,” Dean said. “Probably a better chance of finding something out here, at least for now.”

“Right, any way to avoid talking,” Sam slammed the car door on his way out.

Dean was already at the door of the bar and held it open for Sam to go in first, so tall that he almost had to bend his head to get inside the crappy old place. It was dilapidated and kind of reminded Dean of Ellen’s joint, with the wood and beer signs everywhere.

Sam headed for a booth in the corner and Dean let him go and went to the bar, where the bartender and a couple of regulars were taking in a game on TV. Detroit Lions were bound to suck, so Dean didn’t even bother to look at it.

“Hey,” he said getting the bartender’s attention.

“Hey, what can I do you for?”

“Coupla beers, what you got on tap?” Dean asked.

“Bud, and Miller and the lite versions of both.” A look in the bartender’s eyes said only pussies drank lite beer.

“Two Millers then.” Dean fished in his pocket for his wallet.

“You guys visiting from out of town?” the bartender asked.

“Does it matter?” Both of the regulars had now shifted their attention from the game to the conversation between Dean and the bartender, and both were frowning. One dude was in his forties, with a plaid shirt, Skoal tobacco cap and beer gut the size of Cleveland, while the other was a skinny guy about Sam’s age with grease under his nails. Dean pegged him as a mechanic or repairman.

“I guess not.” The bartender put the first beer on the counter and starting to pull the other. He was frowning too, but obviously remembered he was supposed to get people to buy more beer, not run them off, so he went on. “It’s just that we don’t get strangers in here this time of year. We’re kind of out of the way.”

Dean smiled his most charming smile and hoped the dude wouldn’t look past the white of his teeth to his eyes. “Ya think?” he said. “My brother and me, we’ve been on the road a while, and we were just looking for somewhere quiet to get some beers and not be staring at the back of a semi, right?”

“Tall guy’s your brother?” The greasy younger guy perked up slightly.

“My kid brother, yeah,” Dean said, paying for his beers.

“And you, like, hang out with him?” the guy asked, looking incredulously from Dean to Sam, who looked grumpy as all hell, frowning at the table tent advertisement like it was hieroglyphics to be deciphered. “Voluntarily?”

Dean laughed and took a sip of his beer. It was swill, but not watery, anyway. He weighed his lies and then decided not to bother. Like it would matter to these guys, anyway, if he told the truth.

“Fact is, our dad died a couple of months ago, and so we’re road-tripping for a while, decide what we’re gonna do,” Dean said. The three men all looked at him sympathetically but didn’t say anything, so he went on. “Sam had just graduated Stanford…”

“College?” the greasy guy said, impressed. “He must be smart!”

“Yeah, he kind of is.” Dean glanced proudly over at the scowling Sam. “Doesn’t stop him from being a giant pain in my ass, half the time, though.”

“I hear you, man,” the greasy guy said. “Got my little brother living with me right now since Mom threw him out. Came out here tonight to get the hell away from him and his friends.”

“Our dad worked a lot out of town when we were kids,” Dean said. “I kinda took care of Sammy, too. So I hear you.”

“I love my brother, man.” The guy clutched at his glass. “But he makes me nuts sometimes.”

“I hear that, too,” Dean took another sip of his beer and wondered why the fuck he was having this conversation with anyone. Served him right, telling the truth for once.

“Did you get lost on the way back to the table?” Sam said from right behind him, but Dean could tell from his voice that he wasn’t angry anymore, which was a relief.

“Did you stop being a whiny bitch so I might want to come over there?” Dean rolled his eyes for the benefit of Greasy Guy. “Oh, I guess not.”

Sam picked up the other beer and took a sip. Then he made a face. Greasy Guy cracked up.

“It’s not microbrew,” Dean explained, holding his own beer with his pinkie extended.

“Well, at least he’s not over at your house right now ranting on about Pastor Roberts and his “freaky evil cult”,” Greasy Guy said, with air quotes. “My brother is fucking obsessed. Talks about the pastor twenty-four-seven and how he’s stolen the minds of our women and what Jesus really wants, and drives me nuts. If he just bitched about beer it would at least be normal.”

“Was that why your Mom threw him out?” Dean asked, wondering how he’d suddenly gotten on topic. “This obsession with the pastor?”

“Oh, he’s not obsessed with the pastor, not really. It’s Mom. And some girl he likes, but mostly Mom,” Greasy Guy said. “He’s psycho about the way Mom is constantly at the church and just won’t let it go, even now that she tossed him out on his ass.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t know anything about a little brother who just won’t let a subject die,” Dean said.

“Screw you,” growled Sam, still behind him, but there was no heat in it. Dean grinned around the mouth of his beer but kept his attention on Greasy Guy.

“What do you think about that church?”

“I think Mom’s just looking for something to do. She’s been out of work for a long time and hasn’t had a date in years. She just needs to get out of the house, and if there’s one thing that Pastor Roberts is good at, it’s getting people to go to church. Like every day.”

“Impressive,” Dean took another sip of his beer.

“She’s at Wednesday night prayer group right now, gonna be there all night,” Greasy Guy said. “And Jeremy is just a huge ball of anger and general pain in my ass. Plus having all his friends over who are all bitching about the same thing because their mom or their sister or their girlfriend or their brother goes there. Greasy Guy took a swig and glumly considered his beer bottle. “I mean, for a dude that could give a shit about Jesus, I sure as hell have to hear about him all the time.”

“That sucks, dude,” Dean was all sympathetic. “I’ve never been religious myself. I don’t understand the whole waiting until you’re dead for things to be better thing. Gotta make ‘em better for yourself.”

“Damn straight,” Greasy Guy saluted Dean with his beer.

“Well, drink enough of that and maybe you’ll see Jesus,” the bartender joked. Greasy Guy smiled but didn’t say anything else.

“Later,” Dean headed over to the booth beneath the $2 drafts Tuesday sign, Sam trailing in his wake.

“Ok, that was interesting,” Sam said. “Disturbing, but interesting.”

“It’s probably one of those kids we saw before.”

“They totally did the desecration, didn’t they?”

“They practically confessed,” Dean mused. “And they are obviously much more pissed off than you’d normally be. And his mother throwing him out is totally harsh.”

“I met a few people at college who were kicked out of their families over religion, Dean,” Sam said, quietly, absolutely not touching the other reasons a person might get kicked out of their family. “It just makes people crazy.”

“Crazy enough to kill is what I’m afraid of.”

“Me too,” Sam replied. “And I hate the idea that it was kids who did all this.”

Dean frowned at his glass. “All we know for sure is that they did the church.”

“And they hated the dead kids,” Sam said.

“Yeah, but the pastor didn’t have anything good to say about the dead kids, either. And he knew more about the symbols than he was telling. I’m thinkin’ it’s a lot more likely that he did this than some dumb kids, no matter how harmless he seems.”

“He seems awfully sure it was those boys you were talking to. I don’t know that he pegs them for the murder, though after you went to talk to them, he was implying it pretty heavily. And I knew a few people in school who would have killed each other if they could have, didn’t you?” Sam wanted to know.

“Sure, but I don’t give kids the credit for being this organized. Not with the sigils and the rituals and all that. That was our kind of gig and you know how many people like us we found when we were at school,” Dean observed. “That’s all ceremonial. Makes the pastor more likely.”

“You ready to go check out the church?”

“A couple more minutes, Sammy,” Dean said. “That dude said they’d be there all night.”


	4. Part IV - Twelve o'clock, I gotta rock

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dean was just congratulating himself a bit more on his awesome badassity when a wave of something, a force, drove him to his knees in the middle of the street. He went right down, hard on his kneecaps, like he’d had his legs stapled to the asphalt, no time to try to catch himself on his hands or anything.
> 
> He tried to say, “The fuck!” but all the air was suddenly sucked out of his lungs, maybe out of the whole universe. He tried to turn his head to see if Sam was ok, but he couldn’t even do that. He was trapped there, in the middle of the street, like a piece of fucking roadkill.

Part IV - Twelve o'clock, I gotta rock

It was actually forty-five minutes and two more beers before Sam and Dean found themselves crouching next to the back stairs of the Cement City Baptist Church and trying to listen in. The church was a half-story off the ground, with steps leading up to the front and rear doors, so the height of the windows mostly thwarted spying, but all the lights were on inside and the rumble of voices speaking words in unison could clearly be heard.

“So do we try the basement?” Sam slid down the wall to sit on the chilly concrete next to his brother.

“Probably not a good idea,” Dean said. “We don’t know what the layout is and seeing it’s not life and death right now… I say we wait until everybody leaves and then bust in.”

“Then we’d better get away from the church. There’s no cover here for when they come out the doors.”

“Right,” Dean said. “Where? The car is still at the Tap, and I don’t want to be sitting in it like freaks when those guys come out to go home.”

“They’re gonna know it’s our car.”

“Let’s walk around a little,” Dean said, “See what’s what. And then if anybody says anything, we were just stretching our legs from the long ride.”

Sam got up. “It’s getting cold, anyway. I’m glad to not be sitting.”

Dean and Sam headed down the street that fronted the church but quickly saw they’d wind up out of town if they kept going straight, so they took a left, which would have sent them back toward Brooklyn, but also took them down one of the sad residential streets.

“Do you notice how quiet it is?” Sam asked. “I thought it was weird earlier today when I was talking to Pastor Roberts, but now it’s downright eerie.”

“Just another way things are not right here, Sammy. Place has gone bad and the animals can tell.”

Sam smiled in the darkness.

“What are you grinning at?” Dean asked.

“You feel it, too.”

“I think rocks could feel it.” Dean shoved his hands into his pockets. With the sun down the April night was getting chilly.

As they walked they saw that quite a few houses were dark, nothing but porch lights left on. Dean figured those were the people at the church. It added up to nearly half the town.

The rest of the houses had lights on, and wasn’t that just the way it always was, had always been, Dean and Sammy on the outside in the night walking past all the lighted windows where the normal people were living in normal houses and having normal lives. They were out there so those people never had to realize what bad things lived out in the dark in the places where their lights didn’t reach.

But the most important thing they didn’t know was that of all the bad things out there in the night, the Winchesters were the baddest.

Dean was just congratulating himself a bit more on his awesome badassity when a wave of something, a force, drove him to his knees in the middle of the street. He went right down, hard on his kneecaps, like he’d had his legs stapled to the asphalt, no time to try to catch himself on his hands or anything.

He tried to say, “The fuck!” but all the air was suddenly sucked out of his lungs, maybe out of the whole universe. He tried to turn his head to see if Sam was ok, but he couldn’t even do that. He was trapped there, in the middle of the street, like a piece of fucking roadkill.

All it needed was the glare of oncoming headlights to be the worst nightmare of his life, the one he’d kept having over and over since the accident. As soon as it began, the horrible pressure went away and he could breathe and move again. He looked to his right and there was Sam, on his knees and looking just as shocked as Dean felt.

“Ok, that was bad,” Sam said, voice shaky.

“And it’s going to leave a fucking bruise.” Dean got up and checked to see if the knees were ripped out of his jeans.

“Have you ever felt anything like that?” Sam stood beside him.

“You want an itemized list?” Dean asked, way more shaken than he liked. “It feels just about like every other time some ghost or entity slammed me around. Except that it lasted a lot longer.”

“And the part where you can’t breathe,” Sam said, sounding spooked. “Ever felt anything like that before?”

“No,” Dean said.

“We have to find out what that was. We should check the journal.” Sam turned around to head for the Impala.

“Not just now.” Dean caught his sleeve and turned him around to face the other way, stopping him with a hand flat to the chest. “Look!”

Just ahead, one of the doors of the houses opened up and four teenaged boys spilled out of it, all of them turning directly toward the church.

“God damn it!” Tough Guy shouted. Dean was pretty sure he was Greasy Guy’s brother. The kid was actually balling his fist and shaking it toward the lighted building in the distance.

“Man, what the fuck are they doing over there?” The pimply-faced kid’s voice was shaky and he sounded way past scared, into the irrational state where peasants were so freaked that they picked up pitchforks and torches and started rushing at Frankenstein’s castle.

“What did I tell you guys! Doing stuff just makes it worse!” Jim, the kid from the grocery said. “It’s not just the church he’s controlling now. He’s getting the whole town!”

“Look, we’ve gotta be calm, think this through,” the Tough Guy said. “We’ve got to stick to the plan.”

“I don’t know if we should,” This was Metallica kid now. “I think maybe if we do that, it will be too late. I mean, we didn’t catch on soon enough as it is. Who knows how far along they are?”

“How far along they are at what?” Dean asked, causing all four boys to whirl around toward him and Sam faces pale and scared in the inadequate light cast by the streetlamp.

“You!” Tough Guy took several steps toward them threateningly, hands still balled into fists. It was clear he wanted to punch somebody to make himself feel better. Dean knew the feeling well. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“Trying to help. Now quit jerking me around and tell me exactly what’s going on over at that church. Who is sucking the air out of the world and slamming people to their knees in the middle of the street?”

“You, too, man?” The kid from the grocery store’s eyes were wide with shock.

“Just now. Just a minute ago, before you guys all came out,” Dean said, pointing back down the street to where they’d been stuck.

Tough Guy grimaced. “Before we could come out, you mean.”

“Whatever,” said Dean.

“Please, tell us,” Sam spoke up, voice calm and sincere, but not laying it on too thick. “We’ve seen things like this before. We know what to do about them if we know exactly what we’re facing. It’s important for you to tell us what you know.”

The boys exchanged glances, but mostly what they did was look at Tough Guy, who took several steps closer and stared carefully into Dean’s face for a long minute. Then he looked Sam over as well.

Whatever he saw seemed to satisfy him, because he gave them all a nod, and then crossed his arms over his chest.

“What’s going on here?” Dean asked again.

“It’s a long story. It’s a lot of things. Like Laurie,” the kid from the grocery store said. “She lives over there.” He pointed down the street at a house just like all the other houses in Cement City. Only its porch light was on.

“A couple of years ago, right about when Pastor Roberts came here, her Mom started going to that church. About the same time as her dad got laid off and, well, left.”

“So,” Metallica continued. “Her mom got all crazy into Jesus and was going there day and night and talking about the Apocalypse and lost souls and the Antichrist and all kinds of crazy crap. They were absolutely sure that the Second Coming was happening, like tomorrow.”

“Laurie was really worried about it,” Tough Guy said. “She said her mom wasn’t even the same person anymore. And she didn’t know what to do.”

“Yeah, and so pretty soon Laurie’s not allowed to go to school anymore, and she’s at the church day and night, too. And then the next time we see her she’s telling us all how we’re going to hell for listening to Metallica and going to regular school. It’s like she’s totally brainwashed, or a different person, or something. And when she tried to break away, they just sucked her back in.” Metallica continued.

“They totally stole her soul, man,” Grocery Boy, Jim, said angrily. “She was normal and now she’s some freaky Jesus zombie.”

“And she’s not the only one,” Tough Guy said. “It’s my Mom, too, and half the people in this town. It’s like Pastor Roberts is that guy from Waco or something. People just follow him. And they give all their money to the church and they pray all the time and they just don’t do anything else. He keeps telling them it will make things better, with the power of the Lord, but it’s not making anything better. It’s not getting anybody jobs, or money or anything. It’s just sucking more people into the congregation and putting him in control of them.”

“And now this kind of stuff keeps happening, and the town feels bad all the time. But we really don’t know what it means,” Metallica said.

“What it means is something really bad is happening over at that church,” Tough Guy said. “Something that’s screwed with everybody’s head and got them believing whatever Pastor Roberts says and doing what he tells them.”

“Sometimes people need something to believe in,” Dean said, trying to get them to tell him more about what was actually going on inside the church other than “bad”. “Especially when things are lousy. It doesn’t always make sense, what they choose. But it makes them feel better.”

“Yeah, but should it make them give up all their friends and drop out of school? Should it make them kick their kids out of the house?” Tough Guy confirmed himself as Greasy Guy’s kid brother, Jeremy. “Should it make them turn their backs on their own family? I don’t think so! That pastor, he looks real friendly and he smiles and he talks about love, and victory and the Lord, but he’s not about love and he’s not good. He’s the opposite of good!”

Dean felt for the kid. He remembered too many fights, too many days with Dad and Sammy tearing at one another like junkyard dogs, while Dean didn’t understand why they just couldn’t see what was really important. But he couldn’t deal with that now. He had a job.

“And whoever it was, whoever painted that church is just showing on the outside what it’s all about on the inside,” Jeremy said passionately. “That kind of shit is not what God wants! He’s supposed to love everybody, not just the special buddies of Pastor Roberts!”

“The old pastor wasn’t like that. It was normal church then,” Jim said. “All of us went to it.”

“Won’t step foot in it now,” Pimple-Face folded his arms across his chest.

The boys were still denying they’d defaced the church, so Dean decided to play along in case they actually came up with some useful information.

“Where do you think whoever did it got those symbols from?” Dean nodded at the church behind him.

“That’s the fun part,” Jim said with a mirthless smile. “It was from this old book. From the church.”

“Yeah, there are a bunch of them. The pastor has this old crumbly one and then he Xeroxed it. My Mom’s got one. All the folks from Prayer group have them now. Pastor Roberts says his is original, from the time of Jesus and the time of Abraham, the same writing as was on the Ark of the Covenant,” Jeremy said. “But that’s not true. I looked it up online. That’s all Devil worship stuff.”

“Well, not exactly,” said Dean. “But it’s not ancient Hebrew, either. And you say everybody from Prayer group has these books now?”

“Yeah, they all take ‘em every Wednesday and Friday, Mom and Laurie and everybody,” Jeremy said. “It’s what made mom throw me out. When I told her what it all really was. She called me a liar and a son of the world and a bunch of other stuff. She said the pastor was going to purify this town and make it a good place to live again.”

“Dude, it’s never been a good place to live. My grandpa says not even back in the 1940s when the cement quarry was running. This place was a mine town with a company store and guys trying to kill anyone who wanted to join a union. They’re all high or something,” Jim shook his head.

“High on Jesus,” said Metallica disgustedly.

“Doesn’t sound much like Jesus to me,” Dean said, trying to get them to crack. “But you’ve been real helpful. I knew it was right to ask you about it.”

Jeremy sneered. “Yeah, why’s that?”

“Because I used to be you, dude,” Dean told him. “And I always knew what was really going down no matter how many people felt like lying about it.”

“We need to see one of these books,” Sam spoke up. “We need to see for sure what we’re dealing with.”

“You’re going to have to pry it out of somebody’s cold dead hand, then,” Metallica said. “They keep them with them all the time.”

“There’s nothing you can do,” Jeremy said. “Believe me, I’ve tried everything. Mom kept hers locked in this huge steamer trunk when she wasn’t using it. There was no way we could get to it without her knowing, to compare it to what we found online. We just know that it looked the same.”

“I believe you.” Dean tried to be reassuring even though that was really Sam’s gig. “But we’ve seen some weird crap like this before. And it’s not as hopeless as it seems right now. You can trust me on that.”

“You mean that they’ll all suddenly wake up or something?” Jeremy said skeptically.

“Maybe,” Dean said. “Can’t guarantee it. But I’ve seen it happen before. When people catch on, people like that pastor lose power over them. But the more people know what’s really going on in there, the better chance there is for it all to end.”

Metallica’s expression lightened a bit. “And without anybody else losing their minds or dying.”

“Gotta hope so,” Dean said.

“So you’re sure this book is the key, then?” Sam asked.

“None of the weird stuff happened until they started praying out of it,” Jim kicked at the pavement and frowned down at his shoes thoughtfully. “None of the strange storms. Or the fog that won’t go away for days and days.”

“There used to be birds and squirrels and rabbits everywhere,” the pimple-faced one said. “Now we can barely keep the dogs and cats from running away. It’s totally fucked up.”

“We noticed that before,” Sam had his intent face on. “They went away when the book came? When was that?”

“It was around the same time, yeah. About two years ago, uh, in June,” Jeremy looked thoughtful.

“And after the animals disappeared, we tried to stop it the first time,” Jim said.

“Shut up, man!” Metallica grabbed him by the arm roughly. Jim jerked his arm out of his friend’s grasp.

“They said they could help! We should tell them!”

“We don’t know these guys,” Pimple Face warned.

They were silenced by a glare from Jeremy, who turned to stand toe to toe with Dean. He was a few inches shorter, but obviously trying to face up to things like a man. Dean had to appreciate that. They all were trying to do something about the evil right down the street instead of hiding inside their houses like the rest of the town.

“Look, what do you guys really think you can do?”

“Plenty,” said Dean. “We’ve made things like this go away before. And the less you know about it the less you can get into trouble if something goes wrong. You seem to be fucked up enough by this just because of your families and your friends being involved. You don’t need more crap coming down on you now.”

“You’re not going to hurt anybody?” Jim asked anxiously. “It went bad last time.”

“That’s because some people are untrustworthy assholes,” Jeremy snapped.

“Who is untrustworthy?” Sam was all reassuring and sincere.

Jeremy just glared, but Jim stepped forward. “Matt. Last summer he said he would help. He knew we couldn’t go into the church anymore and have anybody believe us because of Jeremy’s mom and the fact that Laurie used to be Jeremy’s girlfriend and everything. He said he could get the book and help stop it.”

“And he just was playing us,” Metallica spoke up. “Known him all my life. Been in fucking Scouts with him until I was fourteen and then he just went in there, said there was nothing funny going on and blew us off.”

“Not to mention what he did to Laurie,” Jim agreed. “Got her in so much trouble.”

“And then went to school last fall and told all his friends about it,” Pimple Face crossed his arms over his skinny chest. “That we’re a bunch of metal head devil worshipers, going after a nice minister. Do you know how many times my locker’s been trashed this year? I can’t even keep stuff in it.”

“Not to mention my tires,” Jim said.

“And Jeremy getting put in the hospital,” Jim added.

Jeremy gave him a look of death. “You can shut up about that part right now.”

Sam looked at Jim questioningly and he just went on, ignoring his friend.

“The football team jumped him after school. I was at marching band practice…”

“Faggot,” Pimple Face made it sound like a cough. Jim flipped him off as he continued.

“Dave was at work.” Jim indicated Metallica. “And Scott was hunting with his dad, so there was nobody there to back him up. They busted his nose and his ribs and told him and us to lay off the church and Pastor Roberts. That the book wasn’t anything and we should keep our mouths shut and our noses out of it.”

“Because beating me up over the book so totally guaranteed I’d know it wasn’t important,” Jeremy observed sarcastically.

Dean grinned at him in sympathy.

“So the pastor got to Matt, is that what you’re saying?” Sam asked.

“Yeah, and a lot of other stuff,” Jim shrugged. “It’s all getting bigger all the time. More weird stuff happening. This place getting worse and worse, like it wants to push us right out of our houses. People getting hurt.”

“And I don’t see how what you’re planning to do is going to go any better than our plan did,” Jeremy interrupted. “We don’t know you from Adam. You just rolled into town like you think you’re some freaking movie cowboys, tellin’ the helpless townsfolk that you’re gonna solve all our problems. Excuse me if I’m skeptical.”

Dean smiled mirthlessly. “Be as skeptical as you want. We’ll help you anyway. It’s what we do.”

“Yeah, you and fucking Clint Eastwood,” Jeremy said.

“Toshiro Mifune,” mumbled Metallica Dave.

“What?” Jim asked. “Not all that samurai crap again.”

“Toshiro Mifune did it all first,” Dave said. “In the Kurosawa movies. Way more badass than Eastwood.”

“I’d rather have a gun than a samurai sword, even if they look cool,” Jim observed.

“Much as we’d love to stand around all night talking classic movies with you,” Dean said. “We’ve got some weird shit to hunt. So we’ll have to catch you all on the flip side.”

Jeremy eyed Dean. “Or not.”

“Whatever, dude.” Dean turned and headed back up the road toward the church.

“Thanks for telling us about the book and everything.” Sam hung back a moment before following Dean. “That’s really useful information. We can use it to stop all this.”

“Hope it helps,” Dave said as they walked away.

When they were out of earshot Sam said, “Jesus, Dean, did you have to be an asshole to them?”

“Yeah, if I wanted them to back off and leave it to us,” Dean said. “Those guys think they’re going to try something again. Maybe not now, but they were planning in there, Sammy. Last thing we need is a bunch of amateurs running around when we’re trying to fight something with the big-ass mojo that can slam us so we can’t move.”

“Time to get back to the church and get some real intel, then.”

“Yeah.” Dean led the way up the street, walking fast and hoping they’d be in time to see what the pastor and his congregation were actually doing in there that could paralyze a whole town.

000

Sam could feel the hairs on the back of his neck raise up as they neared the church, like an electric current was running through him. The place had felt bad before, but not charged. Not like this. Sam half expected to see a spark when he laid his fingertip on the white clapboard siding.

Dean was scowling, but that didn’t mean he felt it, too. He could just be mulling over what the kids had said or randomly cataloging the guns or maybe thinking about some waitress three states ago. You could never tell with Dean.

“We’ve got to see what’s going on inside,” Sam knew he was stating the obvious. Dean gave him an irritated look.

“Got any genius ideas, genius? Because I’m sure as hell too short to look in those windows.”

Cement City Baptist was raised half a story off the ground. The bottom of the windows started at least nine feet in the air.

“Yeah, give me a boost,” Sam rounded the building to the side furthest away from the houses. “By that window there. The bottom pane is clear. They must have had to replace it.”

“You seriously want me to let you climb me like a freakin’ ladder? Do you know how much you weigh?”

“More than you, but I also have longer arms,” Sam said, reaching them out to their full extension.

Dean glowered at him.

“I can hold onto the window frame where it comes away from the siding, there, and you can’t reach it. That will support some of my weight,” Sam explained.

“Not that much.” Dean grumbled.

“Got a better idea?”

“How ‘bout we do it the other way around?”

“You can’t grab the window frame.”

“But I don’t weigh a freakin’ metric ton, either.”

Sam didn’t back down. He didn’t want to add the fact that he was psychic and might pick up on something Dean would miss.

“I know you haven’t been working out…” Sam let his voice trail off to imply all manner of Dean’s being a total pussy.

Dean glared, but then he bent down and made his hands into a stirrup. Sam carefully put his boot into it, making sure not to smash Dean’s fingers. There was a seriously unpleasant moment when Dean lifted as high as he could and Sam almost fell over, but Sam used his reach to grab onto the bottom of the window frame to steady himself, the weird prickling sensation intensifying until it was almost pain as soon as he touched the church wall. After another bit of leaning all his weight on one of Dean’s shoulders and Dean cursing a blue streak under his breath, Sam was standing on both of them and looking right into the window of the church.

“Holy shit,” Sam said.

“What’s going on?” Dean grabbed Sam’s ankles to steady him further. Sam felt like some kind of Wallenda, but he was steady enough for the moment. He reaffirmed his grip on the window frame and tried to give whispered play-by-play to Dean down below.

“Well, Pastor Roberts is facing the congregation, and they’re all chanting, and there’s a five-foot high white flame burning beside the pastor in front of the altar.”

“Ha ha, now tell me what’s really going on,” Dean grunted slightly as Sam shifted his weight.

“That is what’s going on,” Sam told him, hardly believing his own eyes at the glowing fire at the front of the church. They’d seen demons and spirits enough, both in human form and manifesting in other ways. But this was like nothing Sam had ever laid eyes on. And he wondered how in hell it was stuck there, he didn’t see a Devil’s Trap or anything else to hold it in place. It was so white, almost blinding in its radiance. Sam squinted so he’d be able to keep looking.

He didn’t need Dad’s journal to tell him what it looked like. He’d read the bible. And there it was, in a demon-possessed church.

He whispered down to Dean. “And the prayer is coming to some kind of conclusion and the thing is getting larger and turning a little yellowish now, but there’s blue in the center.”

“It killin’ anybody?” Dean grunted as Sam shifted his weight to see better.

“No, it’s totally weird. It’s just sitting there, and there’s some kind of high-pitched voice. I can’t hear what it’s saying, but it’s not the pastor or anybody from the congregation. I think it’s coming from the flame. Now everyone is going down on their knees and bowing their heads, the pastor, too. They’re all still chanting.”

Which was when Sam caught it, the red glow in the center of the flame, like burning eyes. Everybody else was looking down, so there was no way the congregation would have noticed. And who knew if they’d recognize what it was, if they saw it, anyway.

Sam tried to clamp down on his mind, hoping that whatever it was that the yellow-eyed demon liked about him didn’t extend to red-eyed demons. But the thing was flickering and the eyes were turning around, like a bloodhound catching a scent. Sam ducked sideways, trying to get his head out of the center of the window pane and there was a really bad few seconds there when he almost teetered out of control, but Dean got back under him and shored him up.

The pastor looked up from his prayers and answered Sam’s, raising his hands and saying some words, causing the demon to snuff out like a candle flame, taking the weird electrified feeling that had been making Sam’s skin crawl with it. Sam had no clue how the pastor had managed it.

“What the hell is going on up there?” Dean whispered harshly.

“Um, Pastor Roberts said something and it’s gone, just like that. Now everybody is praying some more.”

Sam stood there for another couple of minutes, but nothing else out of the ordinary happened.

“I hope you’re close to done up there,” Dean grunted. “We’re mostly wearing black standing against the side of a white church like bulls-eye targets on a bale of hay right now.”

“There’s nothing going on but praying in there. And now it looks like regular church testifying, with people coming up and talking at the front. Move out of the way, and I’ll jump down from here.”

“Hang onto the window,” Dean said, and crouched down, letting Sam down to where he was mostly hanging from the sill by his hands. Dean cleared out of the way, and Sam let go and landed lightly on his feet.

“You don’t think it was, like Ezekiel’s wheel or the burning bush or anything?” Dean asked. “You know what it says in the Key of Solomon. It says you can call on the power of angels, too?”

They hurried back behind the building, near the pool of darkness by the back stairwell.

“It looked awfully good. White and everything,” Sam shook his head. “But what have we seen that ever looks like what it’s supposed to look like? And it had red eyes.”

“White flame with red eyes. Demon, then.”

And it was looking for me, Sam thought. But he didn’t say it out loud.

“Yeah, though you’re right that the symbols can supposedly be used to call on the power of angels, too.”

“Do you believe in angels?” Dean asked.

“There are demons, so you figure there has to be something on the other side.”

“Why?”

“What do you mean?” Sam shoved his hands in his jacket pockets. They were cold from clinging to the window frame and a little numb, like they’d been shocked.

“Why does there have to be an other side?” Dean shrugged. “Maybe we’re the other side – the humans. Maybe it’s just us and the dark, and so we have to handle it before it gets us.”

“Then where does the power come from?” Sam asked. “When we use spells or salt or say “Christo?”

“Who cares? As long as it works. Let’s get away from the building, they’re bound to be winding up in there pretty quick.”


	5. Part V - Tells me what I gotta' do

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “That leaves the basement,” Dean said, closing the knife up again.
> 
> “Because going down to the basement in evil places always ends so well,” Sam said.

Part V - Tells me what I gotta' do

About a block down, Dean grabbed Sam by the sleeve and dragged him off the street and into some scraggly bushes in somebody’s yard. The TV was on in the house, but no lights, so it was a pretty decent hiding place. The door to the church had opened and people were spilling out of it into the night. They were chattering, in high spirits, all dressed conservatively, women in skirts, men in dress slacks, formal.

“Well, they seem happy,” Dean said.

“Yeah,” Sam eyed the group skeptically. “I wonder what about? I wonder what all that meant in there. Old Testament stuff isn’t usually very friendly.”

“Let’s find out.” Dean waited for the crowd to pass and then moved quickly and quietly back toward the church. He found them a good vantage behind a car up on blocks. Pastor Roberts came out last, locked up and headed down the street whistling what sounded a lot like “Rock of Ages”. Roberts went on down to one of the crackerjack houses, one that looked just like all the others. Without a look back or around, he went inside and closed the door. Dean waited for two full minutes as the pastor turned on his lights and television, and then he and Sammy slunk around to the back door of the church.

“You got ‘em?” Dean asked.

“Yeah,” said Sam and then picked the lock silently and efficiently while Dean kept lookout.

The inside of the church looked just like half a dozen others he’d been in. There was a little vestibule separating the back door off from the main part of the church. It was filled with old choir robes, ratty hymnals, and hooks for coats. There was also an open stairwell that led down into pitch blackness.

The church didn’t even feel very bad, not any worse than the rest of the town. He didn’t understand it. Not after what Sammy had seen.

“Up or down first?” Sam eyed the dark hole with reluctance.

“Up,” Dean said. “That’s where that thing was. And we’re more likely to find books there. We want to see what we’re dealin’ with.”

Sam nodded and pulled his flashlight out of a pocket.

The colored windows and the town’s weak-ass, widely spaced streetlights did nothing to lighten the inside of the church. There was just enough illumination to walk without bashing into the wooden pews, but no way of telling what any of the various books were without a real light.

Dean turned on his flash and masked the beam with his hand until he got right on top of the books in the first pew. They were all the same. Just slightly less ratty hymnals and old bibles from the 1940s, Baptist certified and Baptist approved. Nothing you couldn’t show your mama.

A quick run through the rows brought nothing but more of the same, but Dean was thorough, checked every single one, and knew Sammy was doing the same on the other side of the room.

“Find anything?” Sam asked as they met in the aisle by the front doors.

“Zilch,” Dean said.

“Basement?”

“Pulpit first.” Dean and Sam headed up the aisle and up the two steps to the raised platform where the pastor performed his gig. Dean’s foot caught on the threadbare carpet there as he got to the top. Sam snickered.

“Nice dance, Grace.”

“You could blow me,” Dean replied casually, kicking at the edge of the rug to move it back where he found it, “Except we’re in church and I think that’s like double hell points or somethin’.”

The kicking worked the opposite of what he expected, revealing something on the floor under the rug.

“Oh, no way.” Sam bent down to fold the rug back.

And there it was, or at least half of it. The sign they’d been afraid to find since seeing the markings at the murder sites and the explanation for why the pastor’s flame hadn’t fried half the congregation.

Dean hissed and squatted down on protesting, bruised knees to get a better look at the carved floorboards.

“Well, isn’t this all kinds of suck,” he said finally, after confirming every symbol was exactly where he thought it would be.

“Eight,” Sam said. “That means eight, and we know about two.”

“The only question is, where are we in the process?” Dean asked. “Are they the first two? Is my old lady one of the others? Are there more that didn’t make the papers like the pastor said? After all, it’s in his church, he ought to know.”

Sam was already searching the rest of the raised platform, but the symbol under the ratty rug was the only indication that the place was not a normal church. Dean double-checked, but there were none of the Xeroxed “prayer books” the boys had mentioned anywhere near the pulpit, either. He’d checked the pulpit for secret compartments and everything, going so far as to run the point of his knife around every freaking joint in the wood and on the ones in the floor for good measure.

“That leaves the basement,” Dean said, closing the knife up again.

“Because going down to the basement in evil places always ends so well,” Sam said.

Dean shrugged. Sure, they’d run into enough nasty things in basements to fill a book of evil shit you find in basements, but it would simply have to be part of a set that included evil shit you find in attics and evil shit you find in living rooms and evil shit that haunts your closet and evil shit that might crawl up out of the toilet if you aren’t real careful, so it’s not like it being a basement made much of a difference.

Dean headed back down the long aisle of the church to the vestibule and then cautiously down the stairs, flashlight on, because there was no excuse for letting something get the drop on them just because Sammy was being a pussy. Despite the halogen flashlight, it didn’t do a hell of a lot to beat back the total blackness in the little church’s basement. It was like all the normal air had been sucked out and had been replaced by ink.

“This is not good, Dean,” Sam said from behind and to his left, his own light helping Dean’s push like an inch further into the well of darkness below. “This is like the definition of not good.”

“Then we must be in the right place.” Dean kept his voice nonchalant, though every hair on the back of his neck was standing straight up.

You could literally feel the badness, the wrongness in the church basement. It was like the world had suddenly turned left on its axis. It was always the left to Dean, when he got into a place like this, maybe because he was right-handed, or maybe because left was a way demons liked to go, he didn’t know. It didn’t matter, really. It was that way and that’s how you knew something had turned from normal to awful.

The darkness was so thick and strong that it was like a weight pressing against them, like walking into a strong wind. It pressed on the light and on their bodies, trying to force them back and out and up the stairs and send them running down the street until they were safe.

Dean grinned into the darkness. It kept grinning back. That really pissed him off.

“Maybe we should go to the car and get some salt,” Sam said calmly, in that maddening way he’d developed when he thought Dean was being unreasonable.

“We’re not here to mess with this right now,” Dean said. “This is a fact-finding tour.”

“Since when are you interested in facts and not just kicking the shit out of whatever evil thing we can find?” Sam’s voice was that same irritating calm.

“Since we need to know how far along they are on the eight dead bodies they’re collecting. Since we want to find out exactly what they’re trying to do with all this. Since we’re probably going to have to come back here and burn down the entire fucking church and I am fresh out of gasoline,” Dean said. “Why does this place look so fucking clean?”

“Because we haven’t stumbled on the abattoir yet?” Sam suggested.

“Why would an evil cult need a piano?” Dean gestured at one sitting to the side of the basement in front of an assortment of chairs, just like it was there for normal choir practice instead of for whatever evil cult activities Pastor Roberts led down there.

“To sing evil cult songs,” Sam replied without missing a beat.

“Joan Crawford has risen….from the grave!” Dean sang softly.

“What the hell, dude?” Sam laughed.

“That’s the most evil ‘Cult song I can think of.” Dean scanned a set of bookshelves in hopes of hitting on Evil Demon Cult Handbook. “I mean, seriously, the idea scares the hell out of me. Her eyebrows are scary all by themselves. Those dudes know their scary shit for musicians.”

Sam chuckled appreciatively and then vanished. Dean whirled around to find that his brother had simply walked away instead of having been snatched by something in the inky darkness.

“Jackpot!” Sam declared, bending down to rummage in a book bag by one of the chairs.

“You’re kidding.” Dean walked over to join him, even though just moving was a huge effort. The whole place felt designed to push them out. “It can’t be this easy.”

“Score.” Sam held up just what Dean had been expecting, a spiral notebook full of Xerox pages, running his huge paw along the side of it like Vanna freakin’ White.

Sam stood up and started moving along the perimeter of the room, just like he hadn’t already found what they were looking for. Of course, he had a point because there might just be more to find. Dean followed along. Close enough so that if something happened he’d be able to help and far enough back that Sammy didn’t feel like Dean was treating him like he was five.

They did a circuit of the room, but despite the horrible feeling permeating the whole place, everything was stunning in its normality. Normal religious books, normal old music, normal kids play area, normal handmade felt tapestries with open-armed Jesuses and white-winged angels with sappy smiles.

Dean had always wondered what people thought that angels had to be so happy about. Angels, in all the versions of the holy books that Dean had ever read, were way more likely to smite your ass with a flaming sword or wreck your town because it was full of sin, or to be some sort of super-spies for God to test you on some rule you hadn’t known. Dean didn’t think he wanted to see the smiles they’d be wearing when they did all that. Probably not the kind of expressions you’d want your kids making out of felt, that was for sure.

He met Sam back at the stairway, staring at one another in confusion and something that Dean didn’t really like to admit was relief. They’d gone in the bad, bad church basement and were about to walk away totally unscathed. It was almost too much to ask for.

Sammy smiled at him, teeth glinting white as he held the flashlight under his face like they used to do when they were kids, telling scary stories in the backseat of the car. Dean recalled that most of their scary stories hadn’t been about monsters or ghosts or witches or the usual crap that scared most kids, but about getting lost or left behind or running away from home.

He remembered that Hansel and Gretel had been just about the worst story in the world, not because they had to escape an evil witch, but because their parents hadn’t wanted them, had thrown them out and told them never to come back. That had been the scariest thing Dean or Sam had ever been able to imagine in the backseat of the Impala on a night when things weren’t going well and Dad had been really pissed off. Sammy used to cry whenever they got to that part, and Dean’d reassure him that he would never ever leave Sammy behind no matter what. And fuck if it hadn’t turned out exactly the other way around.

It probably seemed different to Sammy, though. It had to have, or he never would have been able to do it.

“So, ready for a little heavy reading?” Sam asked.

“Why does it feel so fucking bad down here and nothing’s happening,” Dean looked around in the oppressive darkness like it would help.

“Maybe the bad feeling is enough to keep most people away,” Sam said. “Most people are not us.”

“But that doesn’t add up with them killing people,” Dean said. “Why not set it up so that if somebody gets to your spot and starts poking around, their head pops off or something?”

“If you hadn’t tripped on the rug, and we hadn’t known that we were looking for this,” Sam brandished the book, “We wouldn’t have found anything at all. That keeps these guys safer than setting magical booby traps in the basement.”

“But evil things always set magical booby traps in the basement,” Dean insisted. “That’s what they do. They think a certain kind of way, and scaring people off and not hurting them is not the way, Sammy. As much collateral damage as possible is the way. This seems too…. I don’t know, too smart for a demon or the people who try to deal with demons.”

“You mean it’s non-linear,” Sam said thoughtfully.

“I mean that if the point is to kill and destroy as many people as possible, you don’t bother hiding. Hiding is for posers. This is all too clean, man. It’s bugging me,” Dean started up the stairs. And damned if still nothing happened and they got back outside and back to the car with nothing weird happening at all.

There were still no birds or squirrels around, and the church still radiated darkness like somebody had turned it on with a switch, but there was no more weird feel to the air, nothing remotely out of the ordinary. They drove past the few remaining lighted windows in the houses and back over the river and through the woods to grandmother’s overly nice motel room.

Dean settled down at the table and opened up the book of maps. He made himself a little ruler using the scale and the ammo card. Sam flopped down on one of the beds and piled up all the pillows to go over the evil cult book.

Dean had almost finished drawing and calculating when Sam sighed and put the book aside.

“It’s a copy of a straight-up grimoire, one of the ripoffs from “The Key of Solomon.” It’s nothing you can’t get on the internet.”

“But is it one of the ones that work?” Dean asked.

“Yeah, it is.” Sam tapped a long finger on the spine of the notebook binder. “At least there’s plenty of evidence that people have been using this version for a long time and a string of demonic possessions and fires and catastrophes following whenever anybody does. And when I say “a while” I mean since at least the 1400s.”

“Nice,” Dean told him. “So I guess this just means we get up early in the morning and check out the six other murder sites, then.”

“And we can just go right to them because…?” Sam said.

“Because I am that totally badass,” Dean leaned back in his chair, locking his fingers behind his head and grinned. “And have, like, at least a sixth-grade education including the ability to read, measure with a ruler and add.”

“Have you checked Dad’s journal?” Sam grinned back.

“You got book detail, I’m on logistics.” Dean bent down to untie his boots. “And right now that includes first crack at the bathroom.”

“The soap smells like flowers,” Sam said.

Dean gave him a look.

“I just don’t want to hear the bitching. I saw the look on your face when we came in here,” Sam told him. “This is the nicest motel room we’ve stayed in practically all year.”

“And it’s a flowered nightmare,” Dean said in disgust, eyeing the frilly comforter. “I can feel the testosterone being sucked out of my body by the second.”

“Yeah, but at least you won’t find roaches in your duffel or in the trunk of the car, like in Arizona,” Sam said. “Probably even safe to walk on the carpet with no socks on.”

Dean looked at the carpet, a rather obnoxious shade of royal blue, but he had to agree it looked really, really clean.

“Yeah, it’s spic and span,” Dean stripped off his shirt on the way to the shower. “But it’s still a good thing we’re not staying long. I can see you getting used to this. And then you’ll be asking for your frilly eyelet pillowcases everywhere we go and I will have to disown you.”

Whatever smart-ass thing Sammy said was drowned out by the sound of the shower. Which, of course, also had good water pressure and lacked even a trace of mildew, something Dean knew he could totally get used to.

Michigan was fucking dangerous.

The trip to the demon-worshipping church had gone fine. The rest of the night was bad.

Sam had sat up doing some comparative research on the sigils, while Dean had eventually dropped off after tossing and turning for forty-five minutes or so.

Oddly, since the accident and Dad and everything, it hadn’t been Sam who was having trouble sleeping, but Dean. Outside of the skull-splitting migraines and weakness from his visions, Sam had been good. Calmer than he’d been in a long time, settled into the necessity of what they had to do and of life as they had to live it.

Dean pretended he wasn’t having trouble sleeping, lying his ass off about the nightmares that jerked him from sleep night after night. He had three healing cuts on his hand from grabbing for the Bowie under his pillow. Dean swore he was fine, even though Sam was right there next to him in the same room and could hear the grunts and noises he made like a hurt animal crawling off somewhere to bleed its guts out. And Sam would have to be blind not to see the circles setting in under his brother’s eyes and the hollow zombie-like pallor of his skin. Dean didn’t want to talk about it. He didn’t want to talk about anything. He didn’t want to talk about anything until Sam wanted to choke him. Or slap him. Or say any of about a million totally inappropriate things that Dad used to say when something had gone wrong and he was all pissed off and didn’t know what to do with it.

Dad had usually ended up fighting with Sam.

Sam had spent a lifetime not realizing why that was, but it was like all of a sudden, seeing and being with Dad after having the perspective of being away for four years had made a few things click into place in his head. Stuff he’d never understood, and never wanted to understand about his father and the totally dysfunctional way he had of dealing with the universe and his sons was just suddenly obvious.

Dad kept his mouth shut all the time about everything to protect them, and eventually they, usually Sam, would do something or say something that just caused all those things to overflow all at once. He refused them knowledge to keep them safe, but then he’d dragged Dean right along with him into a life where he was in danger all the time. A life where lack of knowledge about anything could get you killed. Yet Dad refused to see how much not knowing what he was thinking actually put all three of them in more danger than the opposite.

When Sam had been at home, he’d felt Dad was a force of nature, not a person. Dad was the lawgiver like some freaky Old Testament prophet, and Sam remembered having spent weeks sneaking off to cry after Pastor Jim had given a sermon about the prophet Abraham because he was absolutely convinced that Dad was going to kill Dean and he knew he couldn’t tell anybody about it.

He’d only been eight, but he knew that.

He’d been absolutely convinced it was going to happen. He’d run over and over it in his head. He’d been perfectly able to see the surety and steadiness of his Dad’s hands as he’d tied Dean, his voice saying, “It’s all for the best, this will end it all,” the steadiness of his father’s gaze as he’d cut Dean’s throat and watched his blood spill out over the altar of Pastor Jim’s church.

And the worst part had always been the way Dean hadn’t begged, hadn’t even asked his father to change his mind. He’d just gone along with it, trusting John to make the right call, believing that John was infallible, that his death would fix things that were unfixable.

Sam could never remember trusting his dad that much. But Dean always had, and now they both knew how Dad had really felt. That sacrificing Dean was the last thing he’d ever do. And it made Sam wonder what was wrong with him that he’d never realized the truth until his Dad had really made the choice. Sam hadn’t trusted Dad, but he’d always trusted Dean. And now Dean was not himself and Sam wasn’t sure what to trust anymore, even his own thoughts.

He had to get Dean to talk somehow. Whether it was the accident, itself, or whatever the hell Dad had said to him, Dean was a mess.

Other people would probably not even notice the difference. They’d just think he was ordinarily a moody bastard who was alternately getting enthusiastic about maps or fast food and then opening a can of verbal whup-ass on whoever happened to be around. They didn’t know that Dean was ordinarily one of the most upbeat guys in the universe. Dean was an optimist. Even after their freaky childhood full of monsters and tragedy, Dean had always been convinced that things were going to be all right. They were going to be cool, kill evil, find the demon and win, in just about that order. Even when other people thought everything seemed hopeless, Dean was never going to give up and was going to make things be all right. And because Dean believed it so much, Sam did too.

It had always been like that until Dean had had his heart fried. That was the scariest thing that had ever happened to Sam because it had changed Dean from an optimist to some guy Sam didn’t know at all overnight. A guy who gave up and who was ready to lay down and die in some crappy motel room just so long as he could be with Sam. Sam had never thought to see something like that out of his brother. He’d never thought he’d see Dean give up. He’d never thought he’d see him so tired and worn down like an old man.

And it had got him thinking and wondering about Dean, wondering if maybe he hadn’t had Dean as wrong as he’d had Dad all those years.

Maybe Dean was like Sam more than he’d thought. That Dean pretended to be what he thought other people needed to see whenever he wasn’t feeling so well, himself. It didn’t seem so fundamentally strange that he might pretend to be optimistic and totally certain because Dad had always been such a black hole of anger, fear and determination. As if Dean did it deliberately to balance that out.

Sam wasn’t stupid. He knew that certain things bothered Dean. That sometimes Dean worried and thought about things. But as far as he’d ever known, Dean was mostly all right with their lives. He didn’t wrestle with himself over who he was or what he wanted. He just did what he had to do. He was simple. Not that he was stupid or easy to fool, but just because he was what he was all the way down to his bones. One essential thing, not a lot of things all mixed together.

Sam was aware how little thought he gave to other people most of the time. He thought he was pretty normal for most human beings. But Dean was different. It seemed like almost all of Dean’s hoping and planning revolved around other people.

Sam couldn’t remember a single time in his life when Dean had ever said he needed anything for himself. Sam knew that was just that Dean figured what he needed was nobody’s concern but his own, while what other people needed was Dean’s number one concern.

And that added up to a whole lot of trouble for Sam when something really bad happened to Dean. Because Dean just denied there was anything wrong and when he was being stubborn you just couldn’t get anything out of him. When Dean had stopped the car after leaving Mom’s grave and finally talked a little about it, Sam had been hoping that it meant that he was really going to talk about it and get everything that was bothering him off his chest. Instead, Dean had clammed back up and turned into the mess he was right now.

Something was wearing on Dean, eating at him like nothing Sam had ever seen before. Dean wouldn’t talk about it. The patented John Winchester clam-up had never been an effective way with dealing with their lives. And Sam found himself falling back into the habit of a lifetime and almost unable to stop himself from picking at Dean’s open wounds, no matter how he tried. He’d hated the refusal to communicate from Dad and he hated it even more from Dean when they both knew that something Dad hadn’t told them had been the thing that had gotten Dad killed.

Sam just wanted to go across the bed and hit Dean until he stopped making those awful, pained noises. Noises he never allowed himself to make when he was awake.

Fighting was the Winchester way of working things out. They couldn’t talk like normal people. And now he felt himself being sucked back into the dynamic. Except that now he was being some sort of assholish combination of himself and Dad all at once. And Dean was being a combination of Dean and the parts of Dad that had always driven Sam insane. Like there was a John Winchester shaped hole in the universe that his sons were attempting to fill up between them.

And what was worse, he really wanted to be awful to Dean. He actually sat around thinking of mean things he could do to maybe provoke him into finally spilling his guts. Something was already bothering Dean so much that his brother, who could sleep like a baby after five hours wading through a swamp full of zombies and hacking their heads off with a machete, was having nightmares night after night and cutting himself on his own knife by accident. Sam knew that whatever this was, was slowly killing Dean, but Sam didn’t want to make things worse by picking at him to try to make things better.

But Sam was finding it almost irresistible, especially when Dean did one of his schizophrenic heel-turns in the middle of a normal conversation. Or when he woke Sam up in the middle of the night horribly not-crying in his sleep.

Sam stared at the ceiling of the motel room and tried to stop listening. He didn’t think he’d be able to doze off again. Not with the ball of negativity and pain that was his brother almost within arm’s reach.


	6. Part VI - Hit top speed but I'm still movin' much too slow

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dean methodically worked his way through the salad as he scanned the journal for any references to their demon. He was damned sure it was Belial, because of the sigils and the sign the cult was recreating over a six-mile area. Plenty of others, and general advice about not making deals, demons always lie even when they’re telling the truth, etc. etc., but Dad had never run across this one specifically. No help there, either.

Part VI - Hit top speed but I'm still movin' much too slow

Dean woke Sammy up with a pillow to the head at the ass-crack of dawn the next morning. Six sites meant a lot of driving and if they were going to hit them all, they had to get going. Burning daylight and all that. Not to mention it was early April and the days were still pretty short.

“Get up, we’ve got to get movin’,” he said, and since when was his morning pre-coffee voice almost as gravelly as Dad’s? Sam lay face-down in his bed like a huge slug, unmoving and unresponsive. But, then, their Dad’s growling had never had the same effect on Sam as it had on Dean, hitting his spine with a primal urge to move so that Dad wouldn’t be pissed off and maybe the day wouldn’t have to start out completely fucked up.

Just like back then, Sam’s inertia required more direct action, and though he’d have preferred a bucket of cold water, Dean satisfied himself with pulling all Sammy’s covers off onto the floor.

“Have I told you yet today that you suck?” Sam said sleepily, face still buried in one of the frilly pillowcases.

“Just did,” Dean said. “I’m going for coffee. You’d better have clothes on when I get back because we have to haul ass.”

It took him less than five minutes to find a decent gas station with decent coffee, including the girly cappuccino crap that Sam insisted on. Krispy Kreme was out of the question in podunk Michigan, but the place even had good-looking local doughnuts, so he got them a couple of those, paying a lot less than expected, the beauty of not being near a major population center.

Dean liked these jobs the best. City hunting was fraught with potential hazards, too many witnesses, too many cops per square mile, too many cameras, too many lights. And even with all that shit, nobody ever noticed the bad things that went bump in the night and needed hunting. Soon as a hunter showed up, though, they were the ones that hit the radar like a jumbo jet on air traffic control. City people were so attuned to the dangers of other people they forgot that some things were even worse.

In the country, people were used to missing key parts of things, simply because they hadn’t been around to see the start of whatever it was. They didn’t assume they knew everything about everything. They cared about their neighbors. And they still had just enough superstitious dread from being alone in the big black nothing, to at least consider the possibility that bad things that weren’t human might exist out in the dark. That made everything easier for people like Dean Winchester.

Today, the Michigan obsession with hunting was going to play right into their hands. Nobody would question that they were out looking for a good spot to put their blind, or tracking to make sure they were in the right area to get that perfect twelve-point buck. And because Michigan was crazy for the hunting, the most that would happen if they wound up on private land was that they’d get yelled at and told to leave. If you did that sometimes in the West or the South, you’d get shot at. They were lucky to be up north.

He got back to the hotel room to find his brother dressed and staring blearily at the Weather Channel. It was kind of funny, really. Sam had always been more of a morning person than Dean. Dean liked being out at night, awake at all hours, killing bad shit in the darkness. He never felt really great until it was afternoon. And he hoped this didn’t signal that he was constitutionally predisposed to vampirism or something. Getting up when you needed to get up and get things done was nothing better than hardcore discipline. Dean forced himself to do what had to be done because it had to be done.

“Do you have some kind of personal objection to getting eight hours of sleep?” Sam asked. “We went to bed at like, one. And it’s six-thirty now.”

“Sleep is for the weak, pussy.” Dean handed Sam his girlie coffee and held out the remaining doughnuts, his own having been consumed in the car on the way back to the motel.

“And your typical nutritionally-balanced morning meal as well,” Sam said, taking both. “Caffeine and sugar groups all taken care of.”

“I’m sowwy the widdle pwincess didn’t get her beauty sleep,” Dean sneered. “I guess I’ll just have to raise your dowry to get somebody to take your haggy ass off my hands when the time comes, seeing how all this hard living is wrecking your youthful good looks and all.”

Sam just grunted and sipped his coffee.

“Now eat your damned doughnut and get your ass in the car.” Dean slammed out the door with the map book rolled up in his hand. He was behind the wheel, rummaging for a new tape when Sam finally made it out to the car.

“Where first?” Sam asked.

“Most of this stuff is just out in empty fields.” Dean backed out of the space and pulled out of the drive to US 12, jamming some Alice Cooper into the tape deck to piss Sam off for good measure. “The two we’ve been to are the only actual places with names.”

“Right,” Sam said. “And so you think we’re just going to find exactly what they’ve been up to?”

“Don’t know,” Dean replied. “We did yesterday.”

“But we knew where the sites were, then.”

“And we know where they are now, too.” Dean shut Sam down. He knew they had to go look and Dean had no idea why they were having this stupid argument. It was like Sam had gotten up on the wrong side of the damned bed or something.

They drove in silence, Sam occasionally sipping his drink. Dean had downed his own coffee like it was medicine on the way back from the gas station, inoculating himself against the caffeine-deprivation headache he’d have gotten by noon if he hadn’t had any.

Dean pulled off onto a dirt track between two farm fields and stopped the car. He was far enough off the road to partially hide the Impala from sight in tall grass on one side and the remnants of last year’s corn crop on the other, but not so far that he was likely to bottom out or get bogged down in the ruts. The low clearance was the only thing about his baby that was not exactly so useful sometimes. Well, that and the rear-wheel drive in snow. That could suck. But she was so damned pretty that he could forgive her anything. He patted the steering wheel fondly and leaned across Sammy to the glove compartment.

Sam grabbed his arm. Dean looked into his brother’s face and found one of the expressions he’d been coming to dread more and more in the past few weeks all over it.

“Dean,” Sam said in the overdramatic way he sometimes had that reminded Dean of really, really bad soap operas when the doctor was just about to tell some dumbass character they had cancer or something.

“Not now, Sammy.” Dean pulled his arm out of Sam’s grasp and jerked open the glove compartment to rummage for the compass. “We got work.”

“Dean,” Sam repeated softly, placing one huge hand gently on Dean’s shoulder. His oh-so-reasonable and sympathetic tone hit Dean’s last nerve like a hammer.

“Don’t, Sammy,” Dean snarled, pulling the compass out and slamming the glove compartment shut so hard it didn’t latch and bounced open again, spilling maps and take-out napkins all over Sam’s knees. He leaned back into his own seat, Sam’s hand still on his shoulder. “I really DO NOT want to have this conversation now. We’ve got work to do. This is total bullshit to begin with and it is seriously, seriously pissing me off. You keep telling me you want me to tell you how I’m feeling, well, that’s how. Like it?”

“At least you’re being honest,” Sam said, just as softly, and squeezed Dean’s shoulder like he’d just made a breakthrough in some pussy therapy session.

Dean seriously thought he felt synapses popping in his brain, the ones that linked mildly-annoyed-at-Sammy’s-bullcrap to insane-rage-stabbing-anything-in-range. He got out of the car. Quickly. And began striding down the dirt track like it was absolutely imperative that he get down there as fast as humanly possible. Like a life depended on it. He wasn’t exactly sure if it was Sammy’s life or his own, though. It probably didn’t matter. Same diff, anyway.

A few seconds later he heard Sam scrambling along behind him.

“Do you actually know where you’re going?”

“Yeah.” Dean looked at the compass. “I clocked it on the way here. It’s the same distance as the other two sites, three miles due west from the dead center of Cement City, more or less. Now we just have to find the exact spot where they did the sacrifice and left the sign if they’ve even used this point yet.”

“Yeah, but the park at Clark Lake isn’t due north and it’s not far enough east to be northeast from Cement City,” Sam said.

“That’s what makes it a challenge,” Dean grinned. “And that’s why… hey, there, look at that.”

There was a clear track through the grass into the field on their left. Dean bent down to examine it. One set of deer tracks, about two weeks old, judging from the pile of dried shit about ten yards down the trail, on top of two deep ruts obviously made by the nubby tires of ATVs.

He looked at Sammy and raised his eyebrows in triumph. Sam just looked concerned.

“This just might be people out having fun, Dean,” Sam said. “I don’t know about this.”

“If you were hauling somebody out to sacrifice them to a demon, would you want to carry them, or drive them?” Dean climbed up the slight embankment and followed the ATV tracks into the field. It took about two minutes before the tracks led away from the grassy area and into a small stand of trees, like any of the others that dotted the area between the farm fields.

The ATV tracks stopped just inside the patch of woods, near a small clearing holding the remains of a fire pit and a fairly large stack of empty beer cans, crushed and thrown in a pile. All of it was several months old, by the look of it.

“Could have been kids having a field party,” Sam said, hopefully.

“And I bet that’s why they carved that into the tree,” Dean pointed.

“Shit.”

Dean started at the pit and began walking out in concentric circles, while Sam copied the location into a notebook. Whoever had done it hadn’t bothered to try and hide the sacrifice. Dean wasn’t even going to need a shovel.

He picked up a fallen branch and cleared the leaves and dirt off the body. It looked like it’d been there for about the same time as the fire pit, the flesh mostly gone, so you couldn’t see if there’d been a neck wound, a few bones missing as well, probably from animals. But the clothes hadn’t rotted much, and he could see it was a guy, dressed a lot like Sammy dressed, in a U of M hoodie and jeans. Thrown into the bushes nearby was a big backpack.

“Hitchhiker, you think?” Sam asked.

“Or somebody they knew,” Dean replied. “The pastor didn’t seem much in favor of formal education.”

Sam went over to the backpack and began rummaging.

“It looks like they didn’t take anything,” he said after he’d gone through it. “Everything’s neat.”

“Did you get his name?”

“Yeah,” Sam said, writing in his journal. “He’s Steve Allison, according to the books. Looks like an engineering student.”

“Then we’ll call it in, once we get rid of the demon,” Dean glanced from the body to the sigil carved in the tree. “So his family will know what’s happened.”

“He’s from Grand Rapids, it looks like,” Sam said. “Probably why we didn’t see it in the local papers. Laundry’s folded, so they must have got him on his way to school.”

“Smart,” Dean said. “Not to get them all locally.”

Sam straightened. “Yeah. Should we salt him?”

Dean dug the EMF meter out of his pocket and checked around. Nothing. Not around the body, the fire or even near the tree with the sigil.

“Naw.” Dean said. “Kid’s clean. They just used him. Didn’t taint him.”

“You think they got his soul?” Sam asked.

“How am I supposed to know?” Dean replied. “I think this demon just wants the life considering it hasn’t done anything to the bodies or possessed anybody. What did the grimoire say?”

“Nothing about that,” Sam shook his head. “It’s probably up to whoever is summoning it, what they offer for what they want. The grimoire just tells how to get in contact and how to protect yourself from the demon once you’ve raised it.”

“Great,” Dean replied. “Nothing as helpful as, well helpful stuff. Let’s get back to the car.”

“I hate leaving him out here, man,” Sam said, hovering by the body.

“From what it looks like, he’s been out here months already,” Dean said. “When would that have been?”

“September, October maybe.”

“Put the date down,” Dean told him. “I think we’re on a monthly cycle and we need to time it. The football players were in February and March. You know that tonight’s a month exactly from the last one.”

“And you’re hoping Steve here was the first,” Sam moved toward him.

“If not, they’ve already accomplished whatever it is they’re trying to do,” Dean said. “Maybe that explains what we saw at the church last night. If that thing is in control, and not the pastor, it’s a whole lot more trouble for us to put it away, and we got nothin’ useful to do that with.”

Sam looked grim.

They returned to the car in silence. Dean backed out of the narrow access way between the fields and onto the blacktopped two-lane. He checked the compass and map and started for the closest turn-off to the next compass-point three miles out from Cement City.

They’d found the third site by two o’clock, which meant five accounted for. Whoever it was wasn’t at all concerned with hiding their meeting places or the bodies of the dead. They just left the fire pits and beer cans out there, maybe tossed a few leaves or a little bit of dirt over the body, like a dog kicking grass in the yard to cover up its crap.

The second one they’d found, at the southeast compass point, had been the worst, a little girl. She seemed little to Dean, though she was probably around thirteen or fourteen, judging by her height and what was left of her outfit. And this one was fresher than the others, too, still had quite a bit of meat on her, a gaping wound in her throat, and smelled pretty bad. Probably killed just before the football players, three months back.

But the worst part, the part that had Sam cursing and kicking things and throwing rocks, was that she was naked from the waist down and her sparkly “Spoiled Rotten” t-shirt torn open. Dean wasn’t any expert on decomposition or forensics, but she looked damaged, unlike the men. Something about the way she was lying there, the sprawl of her limbs. Dean had seen broken before, and he knew what it looked like well enough.

She hadn’t been covered up. Not even leaves, except stuff along the west side of her body that had probably blown there over time. She’d left there like a bag of garbage thrown out of a car window. The sigil was carved into another tree, right next to her head, like a grave marker.

The third one, Mr. South, had still been wearing a prison trustee’s orange jumpsuit. Like the college kid, Steve, he’d been intact and partially covered. He’d been there a long time, maybe beating out Steve for the title of primary victim.

Whoever was doing this was definitely treating the guys better than the girls. Dean wasn’t sure what to make of that. Sam looked in the grimoire, which told them exactly nothing useful.

Dean pored over Dad’s journal while shoveling down a salad he’d ordered just to throw Sammy off. They’d broken off for lunch at Somerset Center, in a small diner covered in wall-to-wall race memorabilia. He had a burger coming after, but something light to start was always nice on your stomach after all the dead things.

Sam had spent nearly half an hour in the can washing his hands before he even sat down to order. Not that he’d touched anything other than Steve’s backpack. But Dean knew how he felt, even though he also knew that no amount of washing helped that kind of dirty. Only destroying whatever had done it would make you clean again once you knew about it. Or cleaner, anyway.

All the deaths were important, but the one he kept picturing in his mind was the little girl. No clothes, sprawled with her legs and arms all wrong. There had been rope marks on her wrists and ankles, too. You could see it even with her flesh all sunken in. You didn’t have to be a coroner or a cop to understand what it meant. There hadn’t been a mark on any of the guys.

Dean methodically worked his way through the salad as he scanned the journal for any references to their demon. He was damned sure it was Belial, because of the sigils and the sign the cult was recreating over a six-mile area. Plenty of others, and general advice about not making deals, demons always lie even when they’re telling the truth, etc. etc., but Dad had never run across this one specifically. No help there, either.

Sam let out a sigh, as he dug into his own salad, finally. But Dean was not going to take him up on it, no way. Sam was being Mr. Psychoanalytical today and Dean just did not have the patience for it.

“What if it wasn’t the demon who did that to her,” Sam said finally, picking at his lettuce with the fork and not bringing any of it to his lips despite the fact that the ranch dressing was homemade and kicked serious ass.

“If not the demon, then who?” Dean knew the answer already but was hoping to get Sam off it.

“The minions,” Sam said. “The people who are trying to raise it, Pastor Roberts and his people.”

“Demons are known to be horny bastards, Sammy.” Dean chewed and swallowed methodically. “I mean look at what that bitch did to me down at the crossroads. I totally had demon tongue right down my throat. Hot demon tongue, but still.”

“You said she was just possessed,” Sam said. “Like the trucker who hit us. Like Meg.”

“Yeah, that’s why I didn’t have to, I don’t know, gargle with kerosene or something,” Dean said.

“Sam frowned. “So, maybe whoever… hurt that girl, maybe they’re possessed, too.”

“Maybe,” Dean said. “Or maybe they’re just fucking evil bastards who need to be put down like dogs.”

“You’re talking about people, Dean,” Sam said. “Not demons, not even vampires.”

“I’m talking about monsters, Sam.” Dean stabbed his cherry tomato hard enough to make it explode all over the last bits of lettuce and red cabbage in the bottom of his bowl. He put down his fork and shoved it to the side. Not worth eating it now.

“We can’t just start taking matters into our own hands,” Sam said. “That’s not the way it works. We don’t get to decide who lives and who dies.”

“Why not?” Dean asked. “Somebody has to.”

“Yeah, and I think we both know how well that works out for the people who start doing it,” Sam said, angry now. “And how well it works out for the people that care about them, too.”

Dean scowled. “This isn’t about Dad. This is, I don’t know, taking out the garbage.”

“It’s murder.” Sam lowered his voice so it wouldn’t carry beyond Dean’s ears or over the crappy country music filling the bar. “Just like what they’re doing to all those people we keep finding.”

“No, it’s not,” Dean said. “Because what they’re doing is having something to gain by it. What they’re doing is getting them something they want. What I am is a disinterested and objective third party, which is what justice is all about, isn’t it?”

“You’re about as objective about this as… I don’t know… as anybody would be whose mom was killed by a demon and whose brother is possibly connected to a demon somehow and whose father died because of that same demon,” Sam looked more pissed off with every word.

“So, you mean--totally objective.” Dean grabbed hold of Sammy’s chain and yanked it for all he was worth, keeping a straight face the whole time.

“You are not Wyatt Earp and this is not the Old West,” Sam refused to rise to the bait. “You are not…”

He stopped as the waitress arrived with their food, a chicken sandwich for Sam that actually smelled pretty good, and a bleu cheeseburger for Dean because he hadn’t had one of those in a really long time.

“Everything ok?” She refilled Dean’s coffee, which was fresh-brewed and pretty good.

“It’s great so far, thanks.” Dean smiled, but didn’t turn on the charm, because she was old enough to be his mom, had hair a truly distressing shade of peroxide-white, and wore acrylic nails so long she could give your average harpy a run for her money.

“You need another Coke?” she asked Sam.

“Diet, thanks,” Sam replied.

Dean smirked at him.

“What?” He bit as neatly and precisely into his chicken sandwich as Sam usually did everything.

“Worried about your girlish figure, Samantha?” Dean took a huge mouthful of his, as it turned out, absolutely kick-ass burger. He’d ordered it medium, because he wasn’t tempting the fate of e coli, but usually these days everybody just burned everything well-done no matter how you ordered it. But lo and behold, it actually was medium and had juice still left in it instead of being dried out like jerky.

“Do you know how much high fructose corn syrup is in regular Coke?” Sam asked. “If you want to know where the obesity epidemic is coming from in this country, you don’t have to look much further than food additives.”

“Do you know how many chemicals are in Diet Coke?” Dean mumbled around a mouthful of meat and tasty, tasty cheese. “Because if you keep drinking that shit, they won’t even need embalming fluid when the time comes.”

“A man picks his poison, I guess.” Sam took another dainty bite of his sandwich. For someone so totally fucking huge, with a very healthy appetite, Sam sure as hell was a neat eater.

Dean wiped juice from his burger off his chin. Sam was looking at him pointedly.

“What?” he asked. “Can’t a man enjoy his burger without being stared at by his dumb-ass kid brother?”

“It’s not even bothering you, is it?” Sam said after a very long few seconds of silent speculation.

“What?” Dean felt tired already before Sammy even had a chance to hound him some more.

“Do you seriously have no conscience left?” Sam asked.

“Never did have much of a one, Sammy,” Dean told him, taking another, smaller bite of his burger so he didn’t choke on rage. “Couldn’t afford it.”

“Right,” Sam said. “To say that I’m really, really tired of this lone cowboy, world-weary bullshit of yours doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of how tired of it I am. So I’m just going to comment and move on. We need to come up with a workable plan that doesn’t include going in guns blazing to take care of this cult. There are women and kids involved. You don’t shoot women and kids who are being controlled or bamboozled by some demon-worshipping, power-tripping asshole.”

“Unless you’re the FBI,” Dean replied. “But point taken. No need to go all Waco on this, I agree.”

“Right, then,” Sam leaned back with a tired sigh like he expected Dean to insist they kill ‘em all and let god or demons sort them out. “So what is our strategy?”

“Hadn’t really thought that far, Sammy,” Dean said. “Don’t even know how many bodies there are yet. Don’t know if they’ve already done whatever they’re trying to do. Whatever whomped on us the other night was pretty powerful, but I couldn’t see the purpose in it. People seem to be enthralled, but they’re being made to, gasp, go to church regularly, which isn’t actually a bad thing, last time I checked. We don’t know what they’re doing in there other than praying, but they seemed pretty happy when they came out and went home to watch TV.”

Dean chewed thoughtfully.

“I can’t figure the angle,” he said. “I don’t see what they’re getting out of this. The pastor is getting attendance, and pulling off some serious mystical shit, but he’s not wealthy or profiting in any way I can see. And demon-worshippers always profit somehow. That’s the whole point.”

“Maybe he’s like Faust and is after forbidden knowledge,” Sam suggested. “We wouldn’t be able to see that.”

“Faust was one in a million,” Dean said. “Every time I’ve heard of this, the profit was material or some kind of a deal involving somebody’s dead somebody or other. Love or money, Sammy. Those are the big motivators. Only geeks would want knowledge and it doesn’t really seem to be a hotbed of intellectualism around here.”

Dean shrugged his shoulders to indicate the NASCAR and racing décor surrounding them. Sam looked around, taking in the restaurant and its patrons in their jeans and ball caps and bland expressions, truckers and waitresses and people ready to go to work second or third shift somewhere. Good people. Ordinary people. The ones that made the world work, but not the ones that were ever going to change it. They both knew that, Sam as well as Dean. These were not the people who were likely to believe that anything existed outside what they could see or feel or touch, unless it was Jesus, and then they’d go for the farthest-fetched story imaginable.

“So he’s told them it’s Jesus?” Sam voiced Dean’s own thought.

“I think he did,” Dean said. “That that was where the power was really coming from. That what they were looking at was from God, that the book was ancient Hebrew. That what they were praying was holy. Demons and their worshippers are nothing if not frauds.”

‘This just gets better and better, doesn’t it?” Sam sounded defeated.

“Finish your lunch, we still have a bunch of places to go before midnight,” Dean said.

“You figure it will be midnight? Because of the fires?”

“It always is for this kind of shit,” Dean shrugged.

“Yeah,” Sam said. “You know, if I was head of a demonic cult, I would so totally do things at noon, just to be, I don’t know, innovative or something.”

“Demon’s special ass-kiss-boy, that’d be you, Sammy. Always sucking up for the A-plus,” Dean replied. But he was smiling, and the rest of the burger went down smooth.

The missing Alzheimer’s lady was next, more or less at the northwest compass point. She was back far enough that you couldn’t have seen the fire from either Liberty or Meridian Road. Her housecoat and nightgown were in place, not like the girl. Her arms were neatly folded at her waist. If she hadn’t been decomposed, and with a gaping wound in her wrinkled throat, she would have looked like she was taking a nap in the sun. There was no bloodstain visible. The sigil was on a rock here, like it had been at the quarry. Carved into sandstone, and placed at her feet like a grave marker. She hadn’t been buried, either, but the rest of it felt respectful, not like the others. Dean didn’t get it. The treatment of the bodies was too random.

Dean marked her down on his map with the sigil. They were months too late to save her, and he’d already forgotten the name he’d written down at the Library. But it was in his notes so he’d be able to contact her family.

That left northeast, near the heavily-populated Lake Columbia, and southeast, off Devil’s Lake highway, again in the middle of the farm fields.

They trudged back to the car, not talking, and Dean headed for the southeast plot. The sun was starting to go down. If it was him, he’d have used the safest spots first. And the middle of a field was a hell of a lot safer than a bog next to a popular boating area full of yuppie houses with lakefront lots. Or what passed for yuppies in Nowhere, Michigan, anyway.

They had to leave the car too close to the road for his comfort and hike back pretty far into fallow farmland. But the ATV tracks were there again. So blatant that he wanted to hit something for the pure, sickening arrogance that they showed. And he already knew what was coming at the end.

Sigil in the tree, firepit beside, pile of beer cans. The remains of a woman this time, too. Young, black, missing all her clothes. She’d fought back. Her fake nails were all broken, and remnants of clothesline still tied her arms to the tree marked with the sigil. She’d been cut on her arms and chest as well. It looked like it must have happened while she was still alive, the wounds were jagged, like she’d been struggling while they’d been inflicted. Dean knew from knife wounds. It was sadism, pure and simple. Torture. And only of the young women.

“You sure you’re not for going Waco on their asses?” Dean’s pen dug into the notebook as he marked down the body’s location.

“We don’t kill people, Dean,” Sam said with finality.

“People didn’t do this.” Dean gestured at what remained of the woman. “People are good. We’ve gotta believe that, Sammy, or what’s the point? What is the point of what we do if people are just as evil as the things we hunt?”

“I can’t answer that,” Sam said. “But I think it’s what prisons are for.”

“And what will prison do to stop somebody who does something like this?” Dean asked. “Make them stop enjoying it? Make them stop thinking about other people like they’re things? Or will it just train them to hide it better? Teach them how to kill a lot more effectively?”

“That’s not for us to decide,” Sam said.

“We decide about all the other things,” Dean replied. “I’m really, really not seeing any difference here, except for the kinds of bullets I’m going to load in the gun.”

“Maybe they’re in thrall, Dean,” Sam said. “Maybe they’re under a spell.”

“Maybe,” Dean said. “And when we find out, we’ll decide. But I don’t think it’s a horny demon making them rape the young female ones. Or cut them with knives. Demons like things to be the same. They like their sacrifices precise. Tidy little packages all wrapped up like Christmas, just for them. And some of these things are not like the others. You watched Sesame Street.”

“And this is what you learned by watching Sesame Street?” Sam asked. “Somebody better get on the phone to the Children’s Television Workshop. Quick, before they scar someone permanently again.”

“This is the last site, other than the one up by the lake,” Dean said.

“And no point going there until midnight, right?” Sam said.

“Right, at worst, we have to find the last body in the dark, and that won’t be hard considering how much they try to hide it. If we’re lucky…”

“We catch them in the act.”

“Yeah. So we have some time to get ready, eat and get our stuff together,” Dean told him. “But I think it’s fast food in the motel on this one. I want to make sure we have everything handy because it’s going to be a lot vs. two no matter how we play it.”

“Providing they’ll be there tonight and we aren’t already too late.” Sam started back to the car.

“Right,” Dean said. “And if they don’t show, we go to church.”

“Then we probably should stop for gas on the way to the motel,” Sam looked grim. Torching a church was serious business.

“Yeah, good thinking.” Dean trudged down the ATV ruts toward the road and into the rapidly setting sun.

“You don’t have a problem with that, do you?” Dean saw his baby up ahead, fortunately, unmolested by passers-by. If there had been passers-by way out here. “Torching a church?”

“Not a church with that symbol carved into the floor, no,” Sam said. “It’s not like we’re in Alabama or anything, and people would mistake it for something else. They’re worshiping a demon.”

“I’m wondering if there might not be a less violent way, now that you have me thinking about it.”

“Spill.” Sam paused, hand on the passenger-side door handle.

“What if we expose them?” Dean unlocked the door and flung himself into the driver’s seat. “We take the camera back in, get photos of the symbol behind the pulpit, under the rug. Then we send them to the paper along with the grimoire. That’s pretty damning, don’t you think? Hard to have power over people if everybody knows where it comes from. Hard to hide what you’re doing any more, and seeing that we’re taking care of whatever they’re doing now, tonight one way or another…”

“Do we really want to go the publicity route?” Sam pulled his door shut, looking thoughtfully toward the ritual site.

“Not publicity for us,” Dean said. “That’s the beauty of it.”

“It would probably be more effective, because burning the church just wrecks the building, not the cult, and looks like another attack on them,” Sam said.

“That’s right.” Dean turned on the car and got back on the road. “And sending it all to the paper exposes the cult and maybe gets it really investigated. We should have taken the camera and gotten pictures of one of the bodies, but it’s too late for that now. We can send what we know to the cops – the state police, considering what everybody’s said about the locals covering stuff up, even names on the hitchhiker and the old lady, and to the paper, and together they’ll hopefully take care of it.”

“We should still get gas, just in case,” Sam said.

“Better be safe than sorry,” Dean agreed, and turned toward Brooklyn, where they could fill up the gas cans he always kept in the trunk for just such an occasion.


	7. Part VII - Start the car

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “How about a demon killed our mom when Sam was a baby and now we have spent our lives in an eternal quest for vengeance, traveling the country in a hot car, destroying evil and generally kicking ass and taking names,” Dean said with a cold grin.
> 
> “God that sounds stupid when you say it out loud,” Sam shook his head.
> 
> “That’s why I usually don’t.”

Part VII - Start the car

While they were at the gas pumps filling up the car and the cans, a corroded beater of an Oldsmobile from the eighties pulled up at the pump next to them. It was probably twenty years newer than the Impala, but it looked like complete crap in comparison to her sleek lines. Sam was sure Dean had to be cringing inwardly at anybody’s car getting in that shape like the rust was leprosy that might rub off on his baby.

“Hey,” Sam looked up in surprise to see Jim, the kid from the grocery standing next to the beater. He looked pretty desperate. Sam recognized that after years of dealing with people handling things they just couldn’t comprehend.

“Hi, Jim, what’s up?” Sam kept his voice casual.

“Got some information for you,” Jim said. “I don’t know if it will help, and Jeremy didn’t want us to tell you, but you guys should know everything if you’re going to try to stop the pastor.”

“Us?” Sam asked, and then saw the girl. She had gotten out of the passenger side and was keeping the car between herself and him. She looked terrified and was glancing around as if some invisible force was about to smite her out of the clear blue sky.

In this town, maybe it would.

“This is Laurie,” Jim said. “She wants to help.”

“Um, Hi, Laurie,” Sam said in his most reassuring voice. “I’m Sam, and the guy with the gas can is my brother, Dean.”

“Hey,” Dean said, looking not terribly happy, which was kind of undermining the whole reassuring thing. Sam didn’t like the idea of more kids getting involved any more than he did. But information was always good, too. You didn’t want to jeopardize the one to prevent the other. And seeing this girl’s name kept coming up again and again, she might be able to tell them more about the pastor’s operations.

“Jim told me you’ve come to stop Pastor Roberts and the signs from God,” Laurie said, her brown eyes wide and frightened.

“Is that what he’s been calling them?” Sam asked.

“I know they’re not, now,” Laurie said seriously, still keeping the beater between her and Sam. “But we pray, and they happen, and the still, small voice speaks to us from the cold flames. And it tells us things.”

“Like what things?” Sam asked.

“That we should obey the pastor,” Laurie said. “That as more and more come to us, we’ll grow stronger and stronger until everyone will know the power of the Lord. And more do come, all the time. They come to see the miracles. In the past two years we’ve got twice as many people, the church was empty and now it’s full. He’s a lot different than our old pastor. He talks about the Rapture and the end of the world, the war between the demons and the angels that will come, and all the people who will be caught in the middle. He wants all of us to be among the ones who are chosen.”

“Chosen for what?”

“To be warriors for the Lord,” she explained. “He says we need to be ready. And soon.”

“Does he say anything about how soon?” Sam asked, feeling a chill down his spine.

“Just soon,” Laurie said.

Sam looked over at Dean to find his brother standing utterly still and staring at the girl with his face completely expressionless, everything in him turned inward. Sam had seldom seen Dean like that and with what had been going on lately that was just about the worst thing he could have imagined. Dean had been shut down badly enough since Dad had died, and when he was talking he’d been irritable and moody as hell, but at least he’d started to talk, not like when they’d been at Bobby’s. Sam felt like he was seeing that all over again now, nothing out of his brother but that silent tension he hated so much, that he only saw now when Dean woke up in the middle of the night not screaming.

Sam looked back at Laurie, who was staring at Dean and looking more terrified by the second.

“Dean!” Sam spoke quietly, but urgently. It didn’t even make an impact. “You’re freaking her out, man!”

“He says a war is coming,” Dean said, sounding as strained as he looked.

“Yeah,” said Jim. “Don’t get weird about it. It’s just all that Rapture crap from Revelations. He’s got them reading Revelations all the time.”

“Just the pastor?” Dean asked. “Laurie?”

“He says it, and sometimes…” Laurie says. “Sometimes the voice says it, too, the “still, small voice” of the Lord. We can hear it, but we never see anything but the flame. It’s like the burning bush, Pastor Roberts says. But… I’ve always thought fire was, you know, from hell.”

She looked at Dean’s face, searching for something.

“Isn’t it?” she asked.

“God spoke to Moses from the burning bush in the Bible,” Sam said grabbing her attention away from Dean. “Ezekiel saw a burning wheel in the air. God used fire to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah.”

“And demons use fire, too,” Dean said, his voice as cold and expressionless as his face. “And they burn people. They burn them right in front of you and you can’t stop them.”

“Laurie, we think the thing you see at the church is probably a demon,” Sam interrupted before Dean could go on and spook her more, as much as he wanted to follow up on it and get at whatever it was that was eating Dean alive. But now was not the time or place. “It could be that Pastor Roberts doesn’t know. If he hasn’t been asking you to do anything wrong, there’s a chance of that.”

“Or he could be possessed,” Dean said. “You can’t tell when somebody’s possessed unless the Demon tips its hand.”

“But they always do,” Sam spoke up. “They always try to get you to do something bad. Or kill people.”

“He’s never asked us to do anything,” Laurie sounded panicked. “Just to spread the word of the Lord, just to bring people to church with us.”

“Then don’t you worry about it,” Sam said. “Let us handle it and things will go back to normal.”

“Are you in all his prayer groups, Laurie?” Dean asked.

“No,” she said thoughtfully. “There’s the special men’s group on Thursday, the covenant-keepers. The rest of us don’t go when they do, but they never talk about doing anything different.”

Sam and Dean exchanged a significant look.

“Is there anything else you can tell us about this thing that you see in there when you pray?” Dean asked, rounding the gas pumps so that the girl actually cowered backward a few steps.

“J…just that the flame comes when we pray. Not during normal services but at prayer group,” Laurie said. “There are different kinds of prayers we do then, and we draw symbols in Hebrew and say Hebrew words. And when we do them, we hear the voice, or we see the fire. When we do those special prayers, something always happens.”

“How long have you been doing those prayers?” Sam asked.

“About a year. The pastor was already here a year before he started the new prayer group, once he saw that we were righteous enough,” Laurie told him. “He says that only a few chosen Christians can be trusted with the Lord’s power. He had to be sure we were righteous enough before he could show us the truth.”

“How did he know you were righteous enough?” Dean asked. “Did you have to… prove it to him somehow?”

“I know what you’re asking, but no. He got so mad when I went out with Jeremy, and then with Matt, you can’t believe it! He wants us to stay righteous so we’ll be saved when the Rapture comes, or at least to have a chance to redeem ourselves when the war happens,” Laurie explained, eyes dark in her pale face. “He’s never touched anyone or even dated as far as I know. I mean, I’ve heard about those other ministers and priests and stuff. That doesn’t happen here.”

“So you pray from the special prayer book, and say words in Hebrew and that brings the flame with the voice,” Sam said.

“Yes, it doesn’t always talk, but it always comes when we do the special prayers,” Laurie said. “Sometimes Pastor Roberts asks it to show us the Lord’s power, and then it sometimes does things.”

Sam looked at Dean again. He was frowning, but he looked less scary than before. “What kinds of things?”

“Like the other night!” Jim said excitedly. “That’s what pushed us all down on our knees.”

“Yes,” Laurie said. “The Pastor asked it to “Let the whole town feel the Lord’s power,” and so it made it so everyone would have to get down on their knees to pray.”

“The whole town,” Dean’s voice sounded hollow. “That’s what? A couple of square acres?”

“Powerful,” Sam said.

“He’s done things like that a few times,” Laurie said. “It gets stronger all the time.”

“Worship will do that,” Dean said. “For some things, at least.”

“Have you ever seen the flame outside of the church?” Sam asked.

“No. It’s always in the same place, on the platform next to Pastor Roberts,” Laurie looked even more scared, now. “Could it do that? Could it get outside and, I don’t know, come after us?”

“I don’t think so, Laurie,” Sam put on the reassurance again. “The pastor wants to be able to keep it under control. Keeping it in the same place is part of that.”

“So it won’t come after us, now that I’ve told you this?” Laurie was truly freaked out, Sam could tell. And, she wasn’t alone, either. A couple of square acres and all the people in it was a lot of power. He was beginning to have the sinking feeling that they were already too late. That the Pastor had completed all the sacrifices and that was why he could control a whole town with his flame and the “still, small voice”.

“You’re gonna be safe,” Dean’s voice was gruff, but somehow instantly reassuring in the way that Dad’s had always been when he was giving orders. As if by saying it out loud it made whatever he was talking about real somehow. “Everybody’s gonna be safe. We’re going to take care of it.”

“How?” asked Jim. “Seriously, guys, I want to know.”

“Better you don’t,” Sam absolutely meant what he said. The less any of the Cement City kids knew, the better. Especially if there wound up being an exorcism or something equally grim involved. “We’ve done this before. Stuff just like this. It’ll be ok. We’ll make it leave.”

“You know this cryptic stuff is bullshit,” Jim was angry, and Sam knew just how he felt.

“There are a lot of things you just don’t want to know about, kid,” Dean explained. “Just leave it at that. I sure as hell wish I could.”

“Why can’t you, then?” Jim asked.

“Family business,” Dean shrugged and put his hands in the pockets of his leather jacket. “Been doin’ it all my life. A little late to stop now.”

“So leave it to the professionals, ok?” Sam said.

“You do this professionally?” Jim couldn’t have sounded more skeptical if he’d tried. “Like Demons ‘R Us or something?”

“How about a demon killed our mom when Sam was a baby and now we have spent our lives in an eternal quest for vengeance, traveling the country in a hot car, destroying evil and generally kicking ass and taking names,” Dean said with a cold grin.

“God that sounds stupid when you say it out loud,” Sam shook his head.

“That’s why I usually don’t.” Dean was staring at Jim as if the force of truth could burn from his eyes into the kid’s brain or something. And Sam could see the kid starting to bend and maybe believe them.

Sam wondered if he was actually the only one in the family with psychic powers, after all. Because both Dean and his dad had always had the ability to make people do things just by telling them to.

“That sounds retarded,” Jim said. “But I think you believe it.”

“Yeah, I do,” Dean said.

“Up until all this crap happened, I would be calling the cops right now to have you hauled off to the nuthouse. But now…”

“I’ve seen the flame,” Laurie said. “I’ve read the book. It’s all real. Matt and Mike are dead. There are real things happening.”

“And we’re gonna stop them,” Dean’s voice brooked no argument. “Now you two should get home. We’ve still got some things to get together before we make our move.”

“Right,” Jim eyed the gas cans knowingly.

Laurie just looked at them worriedly and got back into the car, followed by Jim. The kids eyed them both and Sam put a hand up in a sort-of wave as the beater pulled off onto Main.

“Eternal quest for vengeance?” he said as Dean screwed the caps back on the cans.

“Not dramatic enough for you?” Dean cocked an eyebrow at him.

“It better not be eternal.” Sam scowled.

“It feels eternal,” Dean got up and headed toward the station to pay. “Put the cans in the car, willya?”

“You know those boys are up to something and Jim was trying to tip us off,” Sam said.

Dean gave him a look. “Ya think?”

Sam watched his brother walk to the gas station, swagger intact, but shoulders slightly slumped like they were more and more often these days. He had to pry whatever it was out of him before it ate Dean alive from the inside out, but not now. He’d have to save it up for later. Like so many other things in his life, it would have to wait until a demon was defeated.

Sam put the cans in the car.

They had everything packed and ready to go in fairly short order, had checked out of the motel and driven out near the final site nearly an hour early, on the swampy east side of Lake Columbia. They wound around through the residential neighborhoods for a while, all nice family homes, nice family cars and SUVs in the driveways, Sam keeping them on the compass track. Toward the lake, it was all houses, lights reflecting on the water from windows from across the lake as well. It made Dean wonder where the cult actually thought they were going to pull off a ritual murder. There was no obvious place, just houses and then swampy land behind them, dotted with trees.

There was also nowhere to put the car that wasn’t practically in somebody’s driveway. Dean eventually lucked onto a small boat launch shaded by a few trees, jammed in a double lot between two houses. He pulled his baby down the gravel launch until she was far down toward the water, and at least not likely to light up like a Christmas tree from headlights on the reflectors if somebody drove by.

“I don’t see a fire anywhere over there,” Dean said. “You don’t think they’re inside a house, do you?”

“Why change your M.O. this late?” Sam asked. “You’re just being totally paranoid. It’s only ten fifty-nine. They’re not here yet.”

“So what do we do, twiddle our thumbs for an hour?” Dean asked.

Sam rolled his eyes, “We could run through our checklist again.”

“And I could die of boredom, seeing how we went through it three times already back at the motel,” Dean yawned with lots of extra noise and jaw-waggling and stretched, feeling his vertebrae crack.

“A little too close to time for a nap, and I don’t think we have cards or anything.” Sam was lit up in silhouette as the headlights of another car pulled up behind them.

“Ok, this is bad,” Dean said.

“Down!” Sam dropped down into the passenger seat and pulled Dean into a slouch so that his head wasn’t outlined by the light.

“What are you doing, freak?” Dean protested, untangling Sam’s hands from his jacket.

“Hiding, like a sensible person. Let’s hope it’s not the cops,” Sam said, squishing himself over to the passenger side door and looking into the side mirror to see what was going on with the van.

Dean leaned over and peered into his own side mirror. “No spotlight,” he said. “Probably people come to park, it’s about that time of night.”

“Great, so here we sit like big weirdos at make-out point.” Sam rolled his eyes. “Fabulous.”

Dean adjusted the rearview so he could check out the car behind them. It was a typical soccer mom minivan. And it was full of people. At eleven o’clock at night, when it was too cold to swim or boat, at a deserted launch in a suburban neighborhood.

“I think we’ve hit the jackpot, Sammy.” Dean watched as the doors opened and people started getting out. There were quite a few of them, but nobody seemed to be restrained or unwilling. It was a bunch of guys, in fact. Not the mostly female attendees at Pastor Roberts’ church of demon-worship. Maybe the mysterious men’s group Laurie had talked about?

“I think we haven’t and I’m seriously hoping they’re only looking for a place to leave their car like we were, and will go the other way.” Sam eyed the seven fairly big dudes who’d emerged from the minivan in the side mirror. “We do not need somebody seeing us, considering what we’re doing here.”

“Thank you Capt. Obvious,” Dean replied, still watching the guys getting out of the car. He relaxed a little when he saw the beer. “Field party?”

“Won’t that be awkward when the cultists show up.” Sam was still craning to get a better view of what was happening behind them. “They’re looking at us, Dean.”

“Well, we’re looking at them, it’s only fair.” Dean smacked Sam in the shoulder.

“What if they come over here?”

“Then we’ll lie our asses off,” Dean said. “Like always. Don’t freak on me, man.”

“Ok, so why are we sitting out here in the middle of the night, in a car, facing the water, in the middle of a residential neighborhood,” Sam’s gaze flicked from Dean to the guys and back.

“DEA?” Dean offered.

“Oh, yeah, I can tell what a hotbed of drug use this is,” Sam said. “I’m sure all these suburban moms are shooting smack and smoking crack between running the kids to football practice and gymnastics. Those kids back there and their beer are probably the most serious shit going down right now.”

“Game wardens?” Dean asked.

“We’d have a marked car,” Sam replied. “Not your sweet, sweet baby.” He glanced in the side mirror again. “Shit, they’re coming over here! Now what do we do?”

Dean waited a few very long seconds as his brain refused to come up with any remotely believable explanation. Then he thought of something that was plainly hilarious, and would totally pay Sam back for jamming them into those damn costumes time and time again.

“Kiss me, Sammy,” Dean smiled evilly. The dare was so on.

Sam’s mouth hung open like a beached fish for a few seconds.

“I’ll clock you, is what I’ll do,” Sam said, balling his huge hand into a fist. Dean had to admire the protest, but Sam knew the gauntlet had been officially thrown down.

“Can’t handle it, Sammy? And you the college boy, all enlightened and shit!” Dean waggled his eyebrows suggestively.

"Me? You're the one who is always 'why do they think we're gay?' when we check into motels," Sam sputtered. "Now you want to make out with me? Maybe that's where everybody's getting the impression."

“I want to put one over on those assholes out there, Captain Homophobia!" Dean gestured toward the approaching guys outside. “Seriously, the most obvious explanation for our being here is that we’re taking in the moonlight, enjoying a romantic tryst away from prying eyes. Doesn’t even require fake ID. Now get over here and fake it like the woman you are!”

“That is just asking for an ass-kicking, man,” Sam said seriously. “You just want to get into a fight, don’t you?”

“It’s beautiful is what it is! Nobody in the country is going to tie a couple of fags fooling around at make-out point to a church torching or the ass-kicking of a cult,” Dean said. “Their heads will not be able to comprehend that the two are not mutually exclusive, get it?”

“I am not going to kiss you,” Sam said, giant pussy that he was.

“Then you can pretend to blow me instead.” Triple dog dare. Dean grinned and grabbed at Sam’s shaggy head to pull it toward his lap.

“I am so going to kill you!” Sam dodged and threw a nervous glance back at the mirror to see that the guys with the beer were very, very near now and in a few steps would be able to see right inside the car. He gave Dean a look that should have incinerated him on the spot. “Why do I have to be the one to pretend?”

“Like anybody would believe I was your bitch, bitch,” Dean grinned.

Sam looked at him in that way that said he could see right inside Dean, to that place in his heart where, “Dean is Sammy’s bitch forever” had been burned in letters of fire one night when Dean was four. And then Dean found himself pressed back into the seat cushions as Sammy totally laid one on him.

Sam was not, as Dean had been hoping, a lousy kisser. If he had been, it would have meant hours of future amusement and big brotherly pointers about technique and pleasing your woman until Sam would have wanted to kill him and Dean would have laughed his ass off. But he was actually pretty good at it, if you went for the gentle thing. Dean was a little thrown by that, because he had been expecting a Godfathery “kiss of death,” what with Sam so pissed at the whole idea in the first place.

It was weird, sure enough. For one, Dean was not used to being kissed by somebody bigger than him, or with enormous strong hands, one of which was gripping his shoulder and the other one on his jaw, a little too close to choking range for comfort, actually. He wondered if that was how girls felt when they were kissing him, but then they probably weren’t thinking of all the ways the person they were letting near them could hurt them, which was something Dean always had to consider if he planned on staying alive.

And it was also weird because Sam was kissing him like he loved him, which, of course, he did. And it occurred to Dean that this was probably about only the third or fourth time in his life, depending on what Lisa Parker had actually been feeling in the summer of 1998, that anybody had ever done that. Because the reason most chicks kissed Dean was not at all about love.

“Hey, faggots!” yelled the dudes outside the car, one of them knocking on the driver’s side window with his knuckles. Sam hesitated, knowing they were looking right at them now and then kept on, tilting Dean’s head to get a better angle. Dean found he was gripping Sammy’s jacket, not sure whether to drag him closer or push him away, so he tried to relax and be cool. He knew half of what Sam was doing was to try to rattle him, so he could laugh at him later on, and Dean was so not giving him the satisfaction.

He was also sort of freakishly proud of Sam right now. Because about ninety percent of the time he took everything so damned seriously and just could not go along with a joke, which was what they were doing to those jackasses outside, scamming them bigtime.

“Hey, pervs!” the dudes yelled again and somebody, some asshole, hit his baby on the trunk, rocking her on the shocks. If her paint job had been harmed, Dean couldn’t speak for the future safety of whoever had done it. He growled a little, deep in his throat, at the insult to his baby. Sam started to lose it, Dean could feel him smiling against his lips, his shoulders shaking with laughter.

Then the world was lit up a second time by another pair of headlights. The assholes shaking the car turned around to see what was up. Sam stopped kissing him to peek up over the seat back.

“Get down here!” Dean whispered roughly, dragging Sam down by the grip he had on his jacket. “Do you want them to see you looking?”

“’Nother minivan,” Sam’s expression had turned totally serious now. “Also full of guys. I think we’re in trouble.”

“Like busting heads trouble, or shooting trouble?” Dean replied. Sam gave him a look.

“I don’t like it either, but even we can’t take on a dozen dudes at once,” Dean said. “Be sneaky and tell me what’s going on.”

Sam peeked again. “They’re all turned back to look at the other car,” he whispered. “Guys are getting out of it. One of them is….”

“What? Spit it out, dude.”

“One is tied up.”

“Where’s the pastor?” Dean asked.

“Not here,” Sam said. “I can’t see much from the glare. Shit!”

Sam ducked back down.

The two groups were yelling at each other. Dean couldn’t make out what the far group was saying, but the guys nearest the car agreed to whatever it was. Dean reached out and braced himself against the driver’s side door, because Sam didn’t have a good angle and was pushing him that way, like he was going to lay him down across the front seat.

This earned him the attention of the guys nearest the car again. Several of them grabbed his baby and rocked her side to side, throwing Sam and him both against the door.

“Go back to Kansas, gay boys!”

They rocked the car again, and Sam had to brace himself better so he wouldn’t smash Dean against the door.

And then as soon as they started, the guys were done, heading back to the second minivan and the group with the prisoner.

“They better not have hurt my paint job,” Dean snarled.

“This isn’t good. There are at least twelve of them that I’ve counted plus the tied up kid.” Sam straightened in his seat. “And they aren’t our cultists. But something bad is going to go on with that guy they have with them.”

“It looked like the fucking high school football team to me,” Dean said. “That kid knocking on the window had a letter jacket on.”

“Ok, so let’s get our gear and break this up before we find the cult and break that up.”

“This isn’t our business, Sam,” Dean said. “But… I don’t think we can just leave him there. I really don’t like the whole being tied up thing. What the hell do they think they’re going to do with him?”

“How many fights over crap like this did you get in during high school, again?” Sam asked.

“Which one?” Dean smiled grimly. “A lot more than you did, but I remember you being in a few, too.”

“Yeah,” Sam said.

“Ok, but we have to get in and get out quick,” Dean’s watch light glowed at a touch. “We’ve only got forty-five minutes until midnight.”

“Right.” Sam turned around and waited for the two groups of guys to clear out. They headed across the road and into the field beyond. Probably to drink some beer and beat the ass of that poor kid they were dragging out there with them.

Here were a bunch of guys on the top of their local food chain, and still they felt they had to beat on somebody weaker than them to feel like men. That kind of shit had always mystified Dean, considering there were real things out there to fight.

He got out of the car and opened the trunk, fortunately undamaged, wiping off one of the kids’ greasy handprints with his sleeve as he did so.

It took next to no time for them to get the weapons and the bag of carefully-packed equipment. Dean shut the trunk with the merest whisper of sound.


	8. Part VIII - I try to make the midnight show

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Hi!” Dean said pleasantly, leveling his shotgun at the belly of the dude with the athame. “Drop the knife or I’ll kill you.”

Part VIII - I try to make the midnight show

The moon was bright enough and the trail back into the field clear enough that Sam and Dean didn’t even need flashlights to track the noisy boys and their prisoner. The boys were carrying bags, joking and laughing, and a few had open beers, chugging them down in a businesslike way in order to get the buzz going as quickly as they could. Others were carrying chunks of wood for a fire. Reminded Dean of a hundred similar parties he’d attended growing up. There were always plenty of boys and beer everywhere they went, after all. It was just that usually, the parties he’d gone to had involved girls and loud music instead of just boys, beer and fire. And none of them had ever included a prisoner tied up with rope.

Dean and Sam kept low and shadowed the boys until they curved around behind a copse of trees, but they never so much as looked around. The football players were pretty obviously not expecting anything but what was supposed to happen according to their own plan. Dean nodded at his brother. Sam slipped down one of the little feeder streams heading for the lake, Dean following behind, winding through the trees until they had a covered vantage point where they could see everything and not be seen.

The guys from the vans had reached a clearing and were horsing around and wasting time. This was especially annoying when Dean was crouched along a creekbed where it was damp and there were pricker bushes. But the dudes with the wood finally started a fire, and pretty soon they’d dragged the tied up kid next to it. He was in profile, and already beat up, one eye swollen shut, blood dripping down onto his shirt from his mouth. Even so, Dean recognized their friend from Cement City, the tough kid, Jeremy, who had seemed to be the leader of the boys there.

“What did he do to piss them off, this time, do you think?” Sam asked, whispering as he moved closer to Dean in the bushes.

“They went after him before when they found him alone,” Dean kept his voice as low as Sam’s. “And he didn’t exactly know how to keep his mouth shut, did he?”

“Yeah, but did you get the impression the team hated him in particular? They just went after him that other time so he’d stop bugging Matt about what went on at the church, right?” Sam asked. “And Matt’s dead now. Jeremy just seems to have it in for Pastor Roberts for getting his mom and Laurie into the cult. Why would these guys care about that?”

Things clicked together unpleasantly in Dean’s brain all of a sudden. “Well, we’ve got our motive. Love or money. That’s always what it is. And Jeremy must have got in their faces because he’s still mad about Laurie.”

Sam frowned, obviously assessing what was going on toward the fire and then turned to look back down the trail. “This is the spot where the cult is supposed to do the sacrifice, Dean. It’s about quarter to midnight now, so where the hell are they? There’s nobody coming up the trail.”

“Sam, look,” Dean pointed. The football players had opened up the gym bags to pull out hooded black robes.

“You have got to be kidding,” Sam said.

“How does a pretty shitty little football team in the middle of nowhere go from losing almost every game to state championships in a single year?” Dean deadpanned. “Demon power, rah, rah, rah.”

“Yeah, because selling your soul to win a football game is so totally worth it.”

“I don’t think they’re selling their souls, Sam,” Dean said. “After all, didn’t the grimoire come with like a million instructions on how to get a demon to do what you want without getting hurt yourself?”

Sam watched the scene by the fire. “So it’s sacrifice powered.”

“Looks like it,” Dean replied.

“Does this change our plan?”

“No. Just makes it easier, really,” Dean shook his head in disgust. “I kind of wish I’d brought the rifle, because, seriously, this level of stupidity is worthy of some nice, clean headshots and not a lot of argument. We’d just be cleanin’ pee out of the gene pool at this point.”

Sam gave him one of those pissy looks that usually preceded a lecture on the shadiness of Dean’s moral values. But Dean was spared by a slight splash coming from the left that made them both look that way. There was one of the Cement City boys crouching down and the glint of something metallic.

“There’s what we were afraid of,” Sam pointed at the hiding kid.

“Fucking amateurs,” Dean whispered. “The thing drinks blood! What the hell are they missing about bodies with slit throats and not a drop of blood anywhere?”

“So we better make sure they don’t shoot anybody, then,” Sam said, and began to crab crawl to the kid hiding in the bushes.

To say that all of this was giving Sam a really bad feeling was ignoring everything from the bad light to the eight zillion unpredictable variables that entered the situation with two different groups of civilians showing up on a hunt. One set with guns no less. If he hadn’t been doing this is whole life, he’d have lost it by now. And he knew Dean was also freaked because he always threatened apocalyptic levels of violence when he was worried or nervous. Sam didn’t blame him at all. Things were quickly slipping way out of their control.

As he got near, Sam thought the kid with the pimples, Dave, was going to turn the shotgun on him, but he just frowned and let Sam get within whispering distance.

“Get out of here, asshole!” Dave said, pimples standing out stark against his white face. “You’re fucking up our trap.”

“Look, I know you want to help your friend.” Sam turned on the calm and the reasonableness and nodded to where Jeremy was being led toward the fire in a spiraling ceremonial track. “But you really don’t know what you’re doing. You should let me and Dean handle it. We’ve been taking care of stuff like this for years.”

“This is none of your business and there’s no reason for you to help, no matter what you say!” the kid gripped his shotgun tighter. “We’re handling it on our own. We’ve got them surrounded. We’ve got guns. We’re taking them down for all the things they did!”

“Listen,” Sam said again, glancing at the progressing ritual and seeing he still had a minute, as several of the boys had to say words over Jeremy before he was prepared to be the sacrifice. “They’ve raised a demon. It’s what’s making them win all their games. It wants death, so that’s what they’ve been giving it. If you give it more death, it will just be stronger and harder to get rid of. Do you understand?”

“From the book at the church?” the pimple-faced kid said, face going even whiter if that was possible.

“Yes,” Sam nodded. “We found a copy of it there. The symbols they’ve been leaving at the murder sites are tied to the demon.”

“So can we screw it up without killing them?” the kid asked. “Without Jeremy getting hurt?”

“That’s the plan, man,” Sam said. “Stay cool. When we move, you move, too. But whatever you do, no matter how bad it gets, you absolutely can not use the guns. Guns don’t work on demons and if you spill blood, the demon gets more powerful. You shoot somebody and it wins.” He reached out and gripped the boy’s shoulder, shaking him a little, until the boy nodded and met Sam’s eyes.

“Now go to your friends and tell them what I just told you, and follow our lead. Dean and I have dealt with demons before,” Sam said steadily. “We know what we’re doing.”

Dave nodded and took off to the left, while Sam checked the ritual’s progress. They were lighting black candles in a circle now, so he hurried back to Dean so they’d be ready to move in. But when Sam got back to their hiding place, Dean was gone. “Oh terrific.”

Behind him, there was the sound of a twig snapping. Sam turned and squinted into the darkness. Dean appeared, dragging a girl by the arm, hand firmly clamped over her mouth. Sam could see it was Laurie, looking even more terrified than she’d been at the gas station, and probably not only because of the situation, but because Dean looked unbelievably pissed off.

“There’s your boyfriend, right there,” Dean snarled into her ear as he pushed her down in the ditch beside Sam. “And your being here is doing nothing to help him but is really getting in our way. If he gets killed because of you...”

Tears streamed from big brown eyes, but she didn’t make any noise.

“If you promise not to scream, I’ll take my hand off your mouth,” Dean whispered. The boys by the fire were chanting in unison now, no way they’d hear Dean if he kept his voice down. “If you scream, Jeremy is dead. Those boys are planning to kill him anyway, and if they hear anything they’ll do it quick.”

“They already killed Matt and Mike,” she whispered in a tiny voice. “Matt told me, before they got him. He told me he was sorry for what he’d done to me. He told me they raped and killed some girl from over in Waterloo, just a kid who went to the Jr. High. Not like the others. They were going after people nobody would miss before, prisoners and hookers and hitchhikers and stuff. Sinners, people who deserved it.”

“Like that lady with Alzheimer’s,” Dean said.

The girl looked at him seriously.

“She didn’t know who she was anymore, and her family, they weren’t taking good care of her. Everyone knew that.”

“Sam, remind me not to move here when I’m old,” Dean said.

Sam kept his eyes on Laurie. “Why didn’t you tell us any of this before?”

“Because I didn’t want the boys to know,” Laurie said. “I didn’t know they already did, until Jim spilled about them coming here tonight and Jeremy’s stupid plan.”

Sam nodded agreement and turned to Dean, “All the Cement City boys are here. It’s a plan. They have guns. I told the pimple-faced one…”

“Dave,” Laurie supplied his name.

“I told him to tell the rest not to shoot no matter what. Just to follow our lead and we’d save Jeremy,” Sam said.

“So what is our lead?” Dean glared toward the group by the fire, clearly measuring them up. “Because we don’t have the Colt or any super-powerful demon-killing anything.”

“I think it better start with not letting them raise it in the first place,” Sam said.

One of the football players had a fancy dagger now, and was invoking the cardinal directions, knife in one hand, cheap-ass Xeroxed grimoire in the other. The knife was shiny, jeweled and had probably been bought off the internet at some website with Gothic or Magick in the title. Dean would have laughed at the amateurishness of it all, if the pile of dead, bloodless bodies and the football championship hadn’t meant it was working.

“Yeah, so on three, then,” Dean said to Sam, and then to the girl: “You stay put.”

Sam put a reassuring hand on Laurie’s shoulder. “If this goes badly, you run away as fast as you can and call the police from one of those houses back there.”

She nodded and whispered, “Do you think I should do that now?”

“No,” Dean said. “The police will come in later. You shouldn’t even watch this. I want you out of here, back to somewhere safe. In two hours, if you haven’t already seen them come, call the police.”

“What about Jim and Jeremy and Dave and Scott?” she asked.

“We’ll get them out safe,” Dean said. “Now you go. Quiet and quick as you can. And whatever you do, do NOT tell the pastor about this. In a lot of ways, it’s all his fault. They’re using his book.”

“I know,” she said. “In a lot of ways, it’s my fault, too. I have to make it right.”

“Well, you don’t have to do it by being the sacrifice instead of Jeremy,” Dean told her. You’re going to make it right by telling the cops what you know when the time comes. And they’re going to put these guys away and make sure they can’t hurt anybody anymore.”

“And what are you going to do?” she asked.

“Don’t worry about it.” Dean gripped her shoulder and gave her a little shove back the way they came. “Just go, as fast as you can. And at two a.m. call 911 and send them here. It’ll all be over by then.”

Laurie nodded and slipped away through the trees in the direction of the road.

“She was going to trade herself for him?” Sam asked.

“That’s what she said when I first found her,” Dean said. “Which is what I was talking about with the amateurs.”

Sam’s voice softened. “Professionals do it sometimes, too.”

“Don’t make me pound you, Sammy,” Dean said, then plastered on a maniacal grin. “Let’s go whup some football player ass!”

He scrambled up the bank and burst out of the tree line at a dead run, shotgun at the ready and Sam hot on his heels. The idiots were so busy with their fire and their chanting that they didn’t even notice until Dean stopped his forward momentum by body clocking the nearest one and clubbing him over the head with the gun stock, knowing better than to spill blood. Sam followed suit, taking another down with a blow to the side of the head and stepping into his place in the circle, beside Dean. So far, so good. Two down bloodlessly.

“Hi!” Dean said pleasantly, leveling his shotgun at the belly of the dude with the athame. “Drop the knife or I’ll kill you.”

Dean didn’t believe in prayer as such, but right now he was praying nobody decided to be a hero. Their hands were totally tied, seeing he and Sam didn’t want to actually raise the damned demon, but those football players had already killed seven people and they didn’t really give a fuck who they hurt.

“What the hell!” The football cultist to Sam’s left grabbed at Sam’s gun only to be rammed in the belly with it. Bastard dropped like a side of beef. Dean did the same to the one to his right just on principle. Four down. It almost seemed too easy. Somebody was about to be stupid any second now and he hoped to whatever was out there that it wasn’t him.

“Do you not speaka the Engleesh?” Dean asked again, in that super shiny pleasant voice hoping that maybe if they thought he was psycho enough, they’d listen. “Drop the knife! Now!”

“They’re just two guys,” one of the football players said. “We can take them!”

“Not before I kill your buddy there. This is a 20-gauge shotgun, and I’ve got two barrels of triple-ought buckshot,” Dean said. Rock salt loads, actually, but what these guys didn’t know would still hurt like hell. “Should do wonders taking his face off, and I’ll still be able to get the dude across from me before anybody touches me. My partner here is an even better shot than me.”

“And then there’s the ones we’ll get,” Jim emerged from the darkness behind the fire, carrying what looked like a .38. Scott and Dave stepped forward as well, each brandishing their guns. Dean hoped to hell they’d follow instructions instead of just turning the whole place into a circular firing squad and giving the demon buckets of blood and who knew how much power?

“What are you assholes doing here?” The guy with the knife snarled and turned away from Dean to peer through the darkness.

“What do you think, dickhead?” Jeremy smiled up from the ground. “We’re not going to take any more of this shit. It’s over.”

“I told you it was a stupid idea, Kevin,” one of the robed football players said. “I told you we should have got somebody random, but no, you’re all, 'kill two birds with one stone'.”

The kid at Dean’s feet moved, so Dean kicked him in the gut to make sure he stayed down. He started retching, which agreed with Dean’s mood.

“Are you going to put down the knife like I said, or do I start shooting?” Dean maintained his bright, cheerful tone.

The asshole hesitated, and Dean cocked the shotgun. It sounded loud in the still-shocked silence.

The kid opened his hand and his fancy knife fell, narrowly missing Jeremy and landing point-first in the ground.

“Well, nice to see you can be reasonable,” Dean said. “That was good. Means you might get out of this alive.”

“We’ll get out of this alive, all right.” The kid tried to sound cocky, but it fell pretty flat.

“You,” Dean gestured with the shotgun. “With the book. I want you to drop it into the fire. Right now.”

“No!” the first kid, Kevin, said. “No! Don’t do it.”

The kid with the book had a bright idea. Dean could see it in his eyes. This was all going to go to hell within the next three seconds.

“Get ready, Sammy,” he said under his breath.

The kid opened the Xeroxed binder and began reading out the spell. “Deus Pata binde Jesus Behalte Deus Spiritum…”

Dean shifted aim and unloaded with a single barrel into book boy’s chest. The kid screamed, flailing his arms as he stumbled backward. In the kind of luck they usually didn’t have, the binder ended up in the fire, smoldering almost on impact.

“The book!” Another football player scurried forward to drag it from the flames. Sam’s barrel of rock salt caught him square in the chest. Seemed to be Sam’s favorite place to aim.

It was out of hand already, and Dean could see the Cement City boys moving closer and closer. They all had live rounds, which meant blood and death if they used the guns. Six of the football players were already down, seven left standing.

“Let’s clean ‘em up.” Dean unloaded his last barrel at a kid across the fire, trying to ignore the poor bastard’s cry of pain. Sam hesitated, then clubbed down another, gunstock to the stomach. Two tried to run, heading for the Cement City boys. The grocery kid cracked one in the kneecaps, using his shotgun as a bat and dropped him. No blood, it looked like the Cement City kids were listening. Dave downed the other with a sloppy tackle, then started punching him in the head in an unpracticed, but effective way.

Dean took a running leap after the nearest fleeing football player, grabbing him by the fancy cult robe and dragging him to the ground like a lion on the back of a gazelle. Couple of punches to the head, he was out. Dean rolled up to take on the two remaining guys too stupid to run. Sam was already on one, with a solid guillotine, choking the bastard out.

Dean’s grin felt fixed in place as he drove his fists into the last dude’s murdering, raping, demon-raising face. By the time he’d finished his, Sam had dropped the choked out guy unconscious on the grass.

They exchanged glances, neither one of them had even taken a hit.

“Hey, are all you guys ok?” Sam called, and received calls of “yeah,” and “sure” from the Cement City boys. He looked at Dean expectantly, like he thought Dean had a plan. Actually Dean’s plan had ended at about, don’t let them raise the demon.

Dean shrugged. “Book is torched. Asses are kicked,” Dean kicked the arm out from under one of the football players who was trying to get up. “I think our work here is done.”

Typical, Sam thought. Dean’s plan had ended with the end of the ass-kicking. But there was always clean-up.

“Shouldn’t we tie them up or something, so they can’t get away?” Sam said helpfully.

“Who do I look like, Batman? Tying people up and leaving them for Commissioner Gordon?” Dean asked. “Hey, Jeremy, you know all these kids?”

“Yeah.” Jeremy had cut himself free with the dropped knife and was rubbing his wrists to get the circulation back.

“So you can give all their names to the cops, right?” Dean obviously already wanted to get out of there, but things still had to be organized.

“Like they’ll listen to these losers!” Kevin snarled. “My father’s a judge! I won’t do a day in jail.”

“Shut the fuck up.” Jeremy picked Kevin up by the front of his robe and slugged him. Probably broke his nose, if the blood meant anything, but fortunately disrupted ritual meant no demon so the blood didn’t matter. “This isn’t like selling drugs or stealing stuff. You killed people!”

“What do you want to do about the church?” Dean asked Jeremy.

“It’s all over for them, anyway,” Jeremy said. “Once all this gets out. Once everybody knows where the book came from… Pastor Roberts will get run out of town on a rail.”

Sam retrieved his shotgun and walked over to stand by Dean. “So you’re going to expose him?”

“Yeah. But not just us,” Jim said. “Laurie’s going to do it. A real inside perspective. She’s had it. She thinks it’s her fault.”

“It kind of is,” Dean flexed his hand. Sam knew it was probably bruised, he’d seen what Dean had done to that last football player. “She gave them the book.”

“She didn’t give it to them. Matt lied to her and took it. They used her for what they wanted. Like they’ve always done and gotten away with their whole lives,” Jeremy said. “Just like the pastor is doing. Only all he really wants is control over people.”

“Nice thing he wasn’t very ambitious then,” Dean said.

Sam nodded. “Yeah, you think he’d have a megachurch by now.”

“I hate him,” Jeremy’s voice was distilled bitterness. “But I think he really believes he’s doing what’s best for people. He’s just so scared. It comes out in everything that he says, all that stuff about the Rapture, and Revelations and the war and the Antichrist. But he’s got to stop because his book did all this.”

“Ok, well, then I guess we have a few things that you’re going to need,” Dean told the kid. “Sam’s and my research. It shows the locations of all the sacrifices. The places where they left all the bodies, the symbols they correspond to. We even found an obituary for one.”

Sounded like a cue to Sam, so he went back to get their bags and the research, while Dean kept talking to Jeremy. He could tell his brother liked the kid. And Sam had to admire him and his friends a little, too. They’d been way out of their league, but at least they’d been doing something to stop the darkness from swallowing up their whole town. That was a lot more than most people did.

He got back to the fire in time to hear Dean say, “You give all that evidence to the cops. Say we dropped it when we ran away after we broke this sacrifice up and saved your ass.”

“We don’t have to tell anybody you were here at all,” Dave was clearly ready to take credit for saving Jeremy’s ass, himself.

“Do you want to explain the fact that those dudes will be picking rock salt out of their chests for about a week? Do you want the inevitable assault charges from their parents?” Dean asked.

Dave looked less eager now.

“What you’ve got to do is hide those guns you brought. You need to be credible witnesses and you are not the ones that shot at anybody. We did, so you need to blame it all on us.”

Sam dumped the bags on the ground, pulled out the manila envelope full of Dean’s evidence and tossed it on top of Dean’s bag. Then he pulled out a roll of clothesline rope and cut it into lengths.

Dean smiled and grabbed the first couple of them and efficiently began tying the hands of the nearest unconscious football player. With grim smiles, Dave and Jeremy lined up for pieces of rope and went to work on two more.

Kevin sneered and dizzily tried to get to his feet when Dean approached him with his next length of rope, sitting down hard on the ground. “You don’t have any real evidence!”

“Wow, you’re even dumber than you look,” Sam commented, finishing with the rope and heading for another unconscious football player.

“Good thing, too,” Dean replied, pulling Kevin’s hands roughly behind him and binding them securely. “Makes it all easier to clean up.”

“Except for the seven dead people,” Sam said as he bound the next guy.

“Yeah, except for them.” Dean nodded once, short and sharp. “Now, look. Laurie is calling the cops at two, but it might be a good idea if you call, too. Tell them how you were kidnapped and tied up and dragged out here. Do you have a cell phone?”

Jeremy nodded. “Yeah, Jim does.”

“So send somebody out of here with the guns,” Dean said. “Call the cops on Jim’s cell. Tell them all how some random dudes came and helped your buddies save you.”

“But give us a few minutes to get out of here first,” Sam told them, finishing off the last football player. He went back to the bag, picked up the envelope of research and handed it to Jim.

“How long?” Jeremy asked.

“Fifteen minutes should do it,” Dean said. “And try not to give them too clear descriptions of what we look like. An average guy and a tall guy, right?”

“We won’t tell them your names, either,” Jeremy said. “You helped us, we won’t rat you out.”

“Good man.” Dean slugged him in the shoulder in a friendly way. “Now we’re gonna book, got more people to help.”

“Wow, like Toshiro Mifune, for real, then,” Jeremy smiled.

“Take care, you guys.” Sam nodded at the Cement City kids. “Don’t let them get the drop on you before the cops get here.”

“We won’t.” Dave dragged the guy he’d beaten up over to the fire, tossed him on the ground and began working on tying his hands with Scott’s help.

“And get rid of the guns, I’m telling you.” Dean pointed his empty shotgun at them as he headed down the trail back to the car, Sam falling into step just behind him.

Dean was practically stomping his way back down the trail and Sam could tell that the easy win wasn’t sitting well. Everything about the situation had practically guaranteed serious unpleasantness and then they’d just walked in and walked out like they’d gone to one of the kid’s favorite samurai movies for a midnight show instead of trying to fight the bad guys and stop a demon from working its will.

Sam was just relieved. He was relieved that none of the boys had died. He was relieved that neither he nor Dean had been hurt or had to kill anything. He was relieved that none of the boys, even the murderers, had been badly hurt. Seven dead people was enough.

But he could tell it wasn’t enough for Dean. That since Dad had died Dean had somehow convinced himself that everything, absolutely everything, had to end up with the worst possible outcome. That somehow, for them, nothing was supposed to end well. Dean, the one who had spent Sam’s whole childhood telling him everything was going to work out in the end, that everything was going to be fine, was now unable to accept it when something did.

Dean couldn’t accept that sometimes the universe just gave you a gift. Sam was not about to be ungrateful for that. He was going to thank his lucky stars when they came through for him, even if ninety-nine percent of the time those stars sucked.

“Nice kids,” Dean said once they got back to the road. “Kinda like those boys from 'Lord of the Flies'.”

“You mean the kids from the cult?” Sam asked innocently.

“I mean all of them,” Dean said. “Did you see how much the boys from Cement City enjoyed that back there?”

“It was revenge, Dean,” Sam smiled grimly. “You understand revenge.”

“Yeah, but it’s always shocking to see stuff like that from normal people.” Dean opened the Impala’s trunk and they dumped their equipment. Sam went around to the passenger side door. “I mean, I get it when you know what’s really going on out there. That it makes your life kind of more, well… intense. But whatever happened to normal people spending all their time getting laid and drinking until you puke?”

“I don’t know,” Sam said. “I spent most of high school…”

“Whining like a little bitch about wanting to go to soccer practice instead of hunting werewolves with me and dad,” Dean turned around and backed the car out around the two abandoned mini-vans. “Whining about being normal. I guess it wasn’t so different after all?”

“All the places we lived, Dean, I never saw anything like this among normal people,” Sam said. “This is weird. It’s the definition of weird. It’s like the whole place is crazy one way or the other.”

“Well, it’s not like we haven’t been to bad towns before.” Dean headed back toward Brooklyn and the highway, still too tense and clutching the wheel of the car like it was going to save him.

Sam knew he was worried. Sam was worried, too. That maybe, even though no one had died, they hadn’t done enough. That maybe Dean’s first plan of torching the church had been the better one instead of hoping that the boys would be able to successfully wrap things up with the Pastor who had spawned the whole damned thing, no matter how unintentionally.

But he didn’t see how burning the church or destroying a book anyone could just get another copy of off the internet would really help anything. What had to be stopped was people. And people were the most unpredictable things in the universe. And, with people, you just had to hope that the others around them could exert some control.

Sam had to believe that the boys, who knew the situation far better than they did and were from Cement City, would know best how to get the people there to cooperate. Towns had their own way of working. And nobody much liked outsiders coming in and telling them what to do. That had been pretty obvious from the way the boys had reacted in the first place.

Sam just didn’t know. He’d never really been sure. Not like Dad or Dean, who had seemed to have an almost religious conviction about their own rightness whenever they went on a hunt. Sam had always been able to see so many possible outcomes, so many other ways things might have worked. He could just never be positive. And he wasn’t now.

And since Dad, he was also pretty sure that Dean wasn’t either. That it was a lot of what was eating at him. That unquestioning conviction that what they did was right and necessary was eroded. And Dean did not deal well with doubt, no matter how hard he tried to push it away and act like it didn’t matter.

It was mattering now. Dean’s feelings were apparent in everything from the tense line of his shoulders to the set of his jaw as he gritted his teeth, and Sam didn’t know what to do to help. Because where Dean was now was the same place where Sam had spent most of his life. He’d never found a cure for doubt.

Dean turned north on M-50 to hook up with I-94 East to Detroit. “So, didn’t you say you had some lead on another bad town somewhere?” he asked.

“It’s not really a town, but some people have gone missing in Ryerson Station State Park in Pennsylvania,” Sam said. “They were there hiking and just disappeared in the middle of the night. Left all their stuff, the cabin door was left open.”

“You’re kidding me, haunted cabin in the woods,” Dean chuckled, and Sam saw that tension let up a fraction. “Should we be looking around for Sam Raimi filming something?”

Sam shook his head. “That’s what it said in the paper. This was really the only weird thing I’ve seen for days. It’s like all the freak activity has suddenly drained away.”

“Just like it surged a couple of months ago,” Dean frowned.

“Yeah,” Sam told him.

“So how long ago did these guys disappear?”

“Just last weekend, while we were on our way here.”

Dean was watching the road, but Sam was watching Dean. And even though Dean hardly moved, Sam could literally see him giving everything that was bothering him a shove away. The mental effort was that apparent, from the tiniest shrug as Dean shook the last of the tension out of his shoulders to the pop he gave his jaw as he stopped gritting his teeth, to the loosening of his grip on the steering wheel. He’d slammed everything that had been eating him back and locked it down tight in whatever mental box that was labeled “I’m not dealing.” It was amazing and frightening all at once, the manifestation of Dean’s will.

Sam wondered what it would have been like if it had been Dean with the psychic powers, because that was some scary mental gymnastics, there. Dean probably could have done a hell of a lot better with being psychic than moving a piece of furniture one time.

“So the haunted cabin could wait while we took a little detour, then.” Dean’s voice was so cheerful it was almost disturbing.

“Detour where?”

“Windsor,” Dean said.

“Canada?” Sam asked.

“Fun town.” Dean grinned. “Gambling. We could use some cash. Cheap good whiskey and Cuban cigars, cheap antibiotics, we could stand to stock up on them, too. Not to mention that the chicks there strip totally naked AND you can touch them.”

Sam would have bought possession if he hadn’t actually seen Dean will his mood to change. He didn’t know what to say, so he decided to just go along with it. Anything was better than watching Dean suffer. If forced hilarity was what Dean wanted, then forced hilarity it would be. But damned if he could think of anything funny to say, and Dean clearly expected some kind of response.

“You need a passport now,” Sam said lamely. “Do you have one?”

“Of course,” Dean said. “Had to go to Mexico after a dead shaman with Dad a couple of years ago. I’m set.”

“I don’t see why we can’t go then,” Sam said thoughtfully. “You’re right about needing to stock up on stuff.”

“Please tell me that touching hot naked chicks somehow factored into your decision, or I’m seriously going to start worrying about you.” Dean glanced over. “All work and no play makes Sammy a really, really dull boy.”

“Just drive, Dean,” Sam said, but he smiled.

Dean grinned back.

“And on our way to Pennsylvania, we’re stopping in Toledo at Tony Packos,” he added, turning onto I-94.

“No way,” Sam said.

“What do you mean, man?” Dean protested. “It’s like an American institution! It was on M*A*S*H, for God’s sake!”

Sam gave him a look. Dean returned one that was all mock innocence, though he knew perfectly well what the problem was.

“It’s too cold to keep the windows down all the way to Pennsylvania, and we’ll have to if you plan on eating there,” Sam said.

“What are you implying, Sammy?” Dean asked innocently. “I love me some pickled peppers.”

“But they don’t love you,” Sam shook his head. “No Tony Packos. Uh, uh.”

“Way to be a buzzkill, Sammy,” Dean said, but he smiled anyway. He rummaged through the box of tapes sitting between their feet and shoved one in the player, cranking up the volume as Gene Simmons kicked out his opening riff and then Ace joined in an octave up before slamming on to the power chords.

“We are seriously going to have to talk about this regional music thing, Dean,” Sam said, leaning back and stretching his legs as much as he could.

Dean just grinned at him.

The highway rolled black into the night.

-30-


End file.
